


Strength in all its Forms

by Tiritiri_Matangi



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: M/M, Secrets, The Team - Freeform, apocalypse canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-27
Updated: 2013-12-27
Packaged: 2018-01-06 07:43:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 126,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1104224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiritiri_Matangi/pseuds/Tiritiri_Matangi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He isn't broken. Bart Allen has secrets, secrets that define him and that cannot be revealed. As events collide and old enemies discover what even friends do not know, the character that wears the Kid Flash uniform is only one part of his personality. Also, Blue Beetle getting kicked off a roof, ex-boyfriends, clean operations, and a Justice League just reaching the limit of what they'll put up with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Sketchbook - Prologue

Bart had a sketchbook. It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to call it a sketchbook, because there were paintings in watercolor, unclear and pastel, and there were drawings with lines shaded in with pen, cross hatching pressing down through the pages, and there were dark, gloomy landscapes, oil colors making a window into a place that would never happen. But, at the beginning, when he had just arrived and just finished his life’s work and all those other inconsequential things, there were just sketches, made with a pencil stolen from a desk and hidden away in secret and in guilt. Sketches of flowing motion and certain, quick lines, some crinkled where he’d gotten something wrong and ruined the whole thing, some smudged out after he’d finished, not wanting to look back, but every single one of those pages kept, folded together into a book of his own making, a story without words.

Bart knew how much stock people of this time put into ‘therapy’, into talking about his problems or breaking down to have a ‘good cry’. Well, he certainly wasn’t going to be talking to anyone. But maybe the idea had merit. Not that his past bothered him, overmuch. He was strangely, or perhaps not so strangely unconcerned about the whole thing.

But, if anyone had known (and they hadn’t), he’d have been put into a box with Black Canary so fast his head would've spun. And considering who he was, that was saying something. So maybe, he’d thought, he should put himself through his own sort of therapy. It couldn’t hurt, so Bart had researched, delved into the infinite depths of the internet in this time to come up with an answer.

Art wasn't the first thing he tried. He’d tried exercise, wearing the treadmills down into hissing fits of electronics or throwing himself into hero work, spanning the globe and discovering that discoveration itself was, in fact, very crash. It was so amazingly fun here, with the seas clear and the air untainted, and a hundred million corners of the world he hadn’t known existed. So yes, fun, but it didn’t feel like it was… helping him to face his past or whatever.

Then Bart experimented with the most tried and true method. He found some random woman with a degree in looking into people’s heads, and jabbered at her for an hour, without giving anything away. Which was, of course, USELESS, because everything that the internet told him he should talk about? Classified. So freaking classified. Like, above Batman, Dick Grayson has no idea; Tim Drake is oblivious level classified.

Finally one day, thirteen years old and skinny as a bean, all speed and hyperactive energy that made up more of who he was than he realised, Black Spider threw him through a wall.

Yes, it wasn’t the usual path to enlightenment. But Bart would like to point out, if you please, that he is anything but usual, and that the universe has a sarcastic and ironic sense of humour.

The Team and a contingent sent from the League of Shadows were fighting. He didn’t know what about, he’d only been called in as backup, and above a certain speed, he couldn’t trust the communicator in his ear. But they had been fighting, and he had been thrown by Black Spider, and he had managed to sail through a floor length window and into a decorated, almost-artfully styled building that was now in danger of a very drastic remodeling.

He’d thrown whatever came to hand, in an attempt to slow the criminal down, because those webs of his? Majorly moding. So that was how Black Spider ended up covered in lucid green what-he-hoped-was-paint. Actually, it definitely was paint, because the place he’d landed in smelt of sawdust and clay and paper. And sour milk, so that must have been where that sandwich had come from. Black Spider was garnished with the chewed pieces of ham.

Then Miss Martian stepped in, and he was safe, left to quickly unpick the sticky thread that came with that particular villain, and give the room an instant one over to make sure there weren’t any civilians cowering where they shouldn’t be. There wasn’t anyone home, which was a relief, and the place appeared to be a community college. A crackling of static over the comm link sent him bouncing to his feet, but his costume caught on the edge of a desk, flipping the lid off and prompting one of the Spanish swear words Jaime had taught him. Inside, there was dust and chewing gum stuck to the underside of the lid. The one exception to the rule of abandoned space was a pencil, stuck in the corner.

He’d lifted it out. It was pink, psychopathically, Barbie-doll pink, with glitter shining cheaply on its surface. The comm sounded again, this time more coherent, and he jolted back to the matter at hand, sticking the blunt lead cylinder in his pocket and speeding off to run rings around Hook, which always worked out fantastically funny.

Later, he’d remembered the almost absent minded hoarding and took the pencil out again. Objectively, Bart had been aware that something covered in glitter and pink was considered, for some weird reason, emasculating, but he hadn’t seen how a color and small pieces of reflective material, or any combination thereof, would affect how people would see you.

He’d found a pad, a huge sketchbook in the basement of Jay and Joan’s house, when he’d first arrived and consequently gone through everything to be positive it was safe. And he remembered that art was next on the list of supposed therapy options. It only took a second for him to fetch the paper and turn beyond the first heart-hearted, mostly-empty-space attempts at whoever had been given the thing before it had made its way to the land of forgotten oddities in the floor. Then Bart started to draw.

…Of course, that therapy technique turned out to be complete crap too.

But just as, after trying it, he hadn’t stopped exploring, the speedster didn’t give up his little routine of pencil dragging on paper either. He’d always been good with his hands, but this was a challenge. Something that couldn’t be defeated with speed, that couldn’t be cheated at, because even if he drew at superspeed, only practice could make those drawings good. Or, indeed, even remotely like what they were supposed to resemble.

Eventually, the pink pencil was worn down to a stub, useless, lying on his bedside table unable to complete its purpose. By that time, he was more stable. Not convinced that every disaster heralded the Reach’s return. Less likely to run off heedless of anyone else. More comfortable at what was beginning to become home, with Jay and Joan Garrick. They tried to put him in school. He became the most successful delinquent Central City’s public school system had ever seen.

They compromised, and sent him off to study with Garfield. Lucas Carr gave him a test to do, and Bart tested out of that year group. And the next. And the one after that. And the one after that, although he completely failed the English section. Who the hell cared what personification was, anyway? Like he’d ever use that.

They compromised again, or attempted too, because while he was perfectly fine with going off to say, learn how the Zeta Tubes worked, being taught how to write essays was a stupid waste of time. It took a while, and the inclusion of Barry, Wally, Iris, Superman, Nightwing, and one of the Green Lanterns, but eventually they resorted to bribery, and he was put down to do a unit on reading things. Which was unfair. Because. He. Could. Already. Read.

Although the compliment that the Green Lantern gave him, that pinning Bart down was harder than intergalactic diplomacy, that was crash.

He got a set of watercolors, proper ones that came in tubes arranged with their colors like a particularly weird rainbow, with brushes and a new, untouched book of paper to test them on, and they got their English unit done. The untouched pristine blank expanses in the new book were soon filled, filled up with clumsy attempts and curses written into the margins after he smudged up something beyond repair, but his other book, his first book, that wasn’t empty either.

The new book, he filled up with anatomy and studies and landscapes, a picture of the flower growing on the windowsill of Joan’s kitchen, and another picture of it three weeks later as she forgot to water it and it died, brown and brittle.

Once he was confident with his ability to not fuck up a painting, he went back to his old book. The first picture, he painted his mother, laughing with her head thrown back, sunlit as she never was in life. Then a picture of some of the electronics he’d handled, boxes of light blinking steadily. A sleeping roll, and warm cooked food, and then he went back to his new book and painted Joan and Jay together, warm affection that he was trying to snatch and push down into paper.

It was when he tried to paint something dark that he failed. In his old, private book, the warmth of a fire at night. Watercolours captured the fire, but not the darkness, not the solidness of a world without light pollution.

He asked for a set of oil paints, and by now, almost a year after he’d come back to this time, he knew he could do that, simply ask, with nothing guaranteed in return and for nothing other than a stupid hobby. Joan and Jay had agreed, and said that he’d get it for his birthday, and wasn’t that coming up soon? It had to be, didn’t it, what did he want?

Which had meant making up a birthday. On a whim, and because no other day seemed significant, he chose the day he’d arrived in the past. Added to the lie he’d told Nightwing on that day, said that the time travel thing had been a birthday present. He wasn't sure they believed him, but it didn’t do them any harm, and he honestly didn’t know what day he’d been born on, so he couldn’t tell them the truth. The people when Bart had been growing up, they’d had said that this person had seen seven winters, this person seventeen, this person had stopped counting, must have seen over seventy by now, surely. Bart had seen thirteen winters when he first came back. Now fourteen.

Oil paints were different yet again, and it took him half a year to learn how to do anything with them, how to stop treating the paper with the careless strokes of watercolour or sketching, and plan each picture out, have more control over the brush. Also, to clean his brushes afterwards. Watercolor fell off. Oil paint gummed the hairs together and ruined the brush. It took four gummed up sticks for him to learn the lesson.

Then he got bored one day, listening to La’gaan poke fun at Jaime, the two sparring together with first words and in due course fists, grappling with each other with all the ferocity and precision of puppies, and Bart started doodling, grabbing pen and the back of a receipt and sketching out two tiny puppets, frowning when a shoulder twisted where it shouldn’t and turning the line into two spikes. He added tattoos on the other, and fins, until the paper was snatched away from him.

“Coooool!!” Gar held it with his tail, the limb just as practiced as his hands. “Bart, you drew this?!”

“Um…” He hadn’t been thinking about it, really.

“Hey, Blue, La’gaan, come look at this!”

Both heads poked up from the ground at Beast Boy’s call. A renewed struggle broke out as they scrabbled up, pushing at each other and grinning. “Yeah minnow?” Lagoon Boy came forward.

Blue Beetle (Jaime, Jaime, always Jaime now) joined them, peering over Bart’s shoulder at the paper being held by his tail. “Wow, Bart, did you really make this? It’s great!” His accent was thicker for some reason, and his eyes were bright, the compliment genuine.

“You really captured my majesty.” La’gaan grinned, and Bart relaxed a little from his determinedly indifferent posture. “My awesome power, my stubborn greatness, my-“

“Big head?” Jaime suggested, smirking.

“Hey!” And just like that, they were off again, pulling Beast Boy into their tumble. Bart darted in and saved the scrap of paper, before tugging on La’gaan’s ‘hair’ and enjoying the resultant yelp and search for the culprit.

Sometime later, Superboy, Bumblebee, and Mal arrived to find an overturned sofa, Gar stained half purple, Jaime stuck up near the ceiling, and La’gaan completely unaware that Bart had managed to sweep in and draw a mustache on his face with ballpoint pen. The only thing that anyone could agree on was that no one knew when Wonder Girl had arrived, and that they were all quite sorry Batgirl was disturbed from her work.

Really. Very sorry.

So Bart got side tracked by drawing with a pen. It was different than a pencil, permanent if you didn’t use whiteout, and he didn’t like to, it felt like cheating. Crosshatching and shading and learning to press ever so softly, to show the light in monochrome. He put some things in his public book, and some things in the old book, the book that was becoming the home of the bad things he’d seen, the things he didn’t want anyone to have to worry about. Pen became the shades of grey in the twilight as the sun set behind the clouds, the sea of faces, nameless and hopeless.

After the novelty of the pen drawings wore off, he went back to oil paints. The itch to get the darkness right in color not washed out like the watercolors took hold of him, and it took time, but he found the balance with oil paints too, where to blend and where to leave it, how to create rays of light without disturbing the color behind them.

For Jay’s next birthday, Bart got out his watercolors again, and painted portraits of both his guardians. Then he gave them away, and that was the first time he’d given something he’d made away to someone else, and afterwards he sat in his room and used the light tones of his paints to outline his father’s face, abstract and never to be filled in, not until the twin pink screaming things that Iris let him hold became people.

His next winter came and went with a flurry of snow related villain outbreaks and the destruction of one of Lexcorp’s biggest towers. His new book filled with happy carefree things was filled, and he was brought another one for his birthday, and then another. His paintings changed, and Bart stopped painting the things he'd seen and done in his old book, and started something else. They hadn’t had history, in the slave’s life, they hadn’t had books to read to children, but for all that the Reach wanted them to forget, it had only been forty years. The oldest among them had told the stories. Of the west coast, and the four Green Lanterns that had died there, three humans and a monster dog with jutting fangs against everything the Reach could throw at them, half the fleetships that had remained after Warworld destroyed in blazing green light.

The last kyrptonian, and his fall. Bart wondered what had happened to Superboy, in that time, but Conner wasn’t only the clone of Clark Kent. His other father had probably saved him, and hidden him away, and Bart painted that too, that which might or might not have happened, Conner’s unchanging face in a pod. The villains of the Earth turning on the Reach, lashing out in an attempt to survive. Wonder Woman, Red Robin, both Martians, all dead by a bomb too big to dodge. The rest of the Bat family, grieving and slipping into hiding to plot and plan and strike back, Red Hood returned from the dead. So many of the people he knew now, he didn’t know what had happened to them. Kaldur and Artemis were never heard from. The rest of the Team, covert operatives, were doomed to a hushed and anonymous death. The Watchtower out of the sky, taking down Washington DC and burying the ruins of the Hall of Justice in yet more blood-stained concrete.

He drew them, and they were terrible, horrible things, what he knew of them. Bart painted Wally, pulling the hood of the Flash over his head as Barry lay a burnt and broken skeleton on the ground. The resistance movement, Red Hood lethal beside Bruce Wayne, who crouched unmasked in the shadows. The Batcave, broken into, and he’d seen the pictures of this one, the victory that the Reach had lauded, shown to every man, woman, and child.

It was disorganized, not in any chronological order, just as he remembered them, each story he’d been told, each rumor about what the Reach were doing, each lab table he’d been sat in front of as information scrolled past, measuring his intelligence. A watercolor painting, Black, Blue, and Green Beetles standing side by side in front of an army.

The next page, the three Beetles had not changed positions. The army lay in ruins.

It was history. His history, the history that never happened and would never happen, and Bart would fight to keep that, to keep his drawings from becoming anything like the reality of the world. It was strange, because he didn’t leave these things for fun, or for enjoyment. He couldn’t think of anything further from it, in fact, but… They needed to be remembered by somebody, and he was the only one left, really, all the others were gone or changed, and he couldn’t write about it, couldn’t put down what had happened in words callous and cold or expressive and pained, but this? He could do this. He could remember his world this way.

Because, even after all the loss and suffering and dying, it hadn’t been all bad. There were paintings beside the sketches of the fallen heroes of campfires, and people huddled together, singing and laughing after a day’s work. There were paintings of his mom, and the one outline of his dad. There was a sketch of the collar he’d worn around his neck, labelled down to its tiniest part, and he couldn’t look at it without being proud, proud that he’d broken it and twisted it into something that worked for him, not the other way around. There was a watercolor of Neutron, as Bart had first met him, holding out a bowl of food to a young boy with brown hair and green eyes.

No, that world was not good. It was not fun, and it was not healthy. But, in the end, it had and always would be HIS world, HIS time. It was, if not a kind place, the place where he grew up, and it was worth commemoration, it was worth remembering.

On the final page of the old book he had found in a basement, Bart looked over his materials. There wasn’t any movement in what he wanted to draw, so he lay down his pencil next to the old, glittery, pink little stub on his bedside table. He wanted more subtle than the pen, less permanent if he made a mistake, so that too he put aside. The watercolors were light, but they weren’t what he needed, so he left them in their little rows of colored tubes. He picked up the oil paints, and put down what, if his art had been a story, would have been the epilogue.

A brown-haired boy, skinny and weak, but with a face turned upward in three-quarter profile, green eyes hard and defiant. Malnourished but strong, beaten but unbroken, the child knelt, hands rested on a time machine.


	2. Part 1

Down below him was a sea of green.

Appropriate, because this huge feature of the landscape, this basin flooded every year, leaving water and tree roots turned into arches for fish and whatever the hell other sorts of creatures that lived in the river free to make their way outwards and chew on unsuspecting speedsters that stopped for too long. He’d been here during the flood a couple years back, something that might have been related to a mission, or his simple never-idle curiosity. Whatever the reason, he wasn’t keen on doing it again. Best to avoid the Amazon in the rainy season.

The sea of trees was broken only in a couple small places; islands that rose up or sank down to leave clearings, or outcrops of rock like the one he was on. The clearing nearest to him was man made, and occupied.

It was crash, this vast, still mostly unmapped forest, canopy and undergrowth and tangling roots. He’d explored all over the world, but running in jungle had to be the hardest. Roots and trunks and animals who all seemed to be determined to place themselves right in front of his feet, and a banged and bruised Kid Flash to return home. It had taken ages, but finally he’d stumbled upon a solution so simple he was glad that no one had been there to see the light bulb above his head when he’d thought of it.

For a self-proclaimed genius, it had taken him embarrassingly long to realise he could just run on the waterways instead of hacking his way through the bush. His thirteen year old self would have been disgusted at how quickly degradation had set in, only four years later.

So the river networks became his tarmac and he’d poked his nose into the world of weird pig things and water snakes and the monkeys who thought he was the most fantastical thing since ever. This was the first time he’d found something truly untouched, though.

In the occupied clearing, there was a village. An isle of humanity, bobbing about in the seas of forest, and he’d checked the maps, gathered the data that was available so freely from the internet to confirm a hunch. Those people were so far out; only planes had noted their location. They hadn’t ever seen an outsider before.

It wasn’t like he wanted to change that. It was just curiosity that had him perched on a rock, peering through the lens of his goggles at their small, private world. The idea that, for all their efforts and trouble, humans had reached the moon, yet this small pocket remained unaware of the joys of facebook and streetlamps, it bemused him. The idea that, in his time, those people and their children could still have been there, peacefully unaware as to why the planes in the sky had changed to Reach ships, that was even more addictive. Humanity resisting occupation, completely unknowingly.

The speedster had only found them a couple days ago. He’d brought his current artbook along with him, today, to sketch out a painting, and then he’d be gone. No reason to disturb the people happily living their lives there with his unexplained wanderings. Or worse, no reason to upset their culture or religion with the whole superspeed thing. That would be moding. Best to leave them alone.

It only took him ten minutes to lay out the rough outline, another ten to add in more details to watercolour later, and then he was done, or done until he made his way back to his painting set. It felt like cheating, using his speed to lay down those lines, but lingering here for too long wouldn’t be good. Villagers. Outside world. Probably not a complementary mix and it wasn’t something he could decide, so he shouldn’t really stay long, and he’d reasoned this all out before but the temptation remained. New stuff. Interesting things. Bart wasn’t ashamed to admit he was like a moth to a flame, but the thing was, moths flying straight into flames tended to get their wings burnt off and die a horrible fiery death.

Maybe that was taking the metaphor too far.

His phone rang its text alert, some un-amazing, generic sound, and he tucked his stuff back into the backpack he’d grabbed from the hallway at home, which, come to think of it, might have been Wally’s. Oops. But when the message came up it wasn’t his first-cousin-once-removed-they-needed-a-better-word, it was from Miguel.

_i’m in mexico city! come right now._ It said.

Bart frowned at the screen. It wasn’t odd that his phone had gotten the message, because Miguel was cool and he’d given the other hero his number when they were still at the stage of sort-of-flirting with each other, and also because his phone had upgrades that were all perfectly legal, but only because no one had thought of them (not yet, anyway).

But Miguel lived in El Chilar. Which, Bart could tell anyone, was not that far away from Mexico City, not far at all by Bart’s standards, but he didn’t know how other people measured those things. Anyway, Miguel was out of his home town. Again.

This was getting to be a pattern. The first time Bart met Miguel; the Latino had been wearing a costume and summoning glowing purple bricks out of the air. At the time, no one had cared, because there’d been a minor crisis going on and quite a few people with superpowers and waaay too much testosterone in the air as he and the Flash had tried to calm things down. Or failing that, clean things up. Miguel had loudly declared himself to be Bunker, Hero Fighting For Justice, or something along those lines, and had, fairly predictably, gotten shot at.

Luckily, those bricks he made were both bulletproof and made out of something similar to what came out of the Green Lanterns rings, and ‘Bunker’ had, with far less prodding Bart had thought it would take, shielded the civilians in the area while Kid Flash and Flash crashed the criminal’s mode. Afterwards, there was the usual paperwork and bullshit associated with finding a metahuman, but Miguel wasn’t like some of the hopeless cases that they sometimes found. Fully in control of his powers, and without life changing trauma, he’d been left to choose his own path.

It was around that time that one of the younger and ruder people busy checking to see if the new found metahuman would evolve into a supervillain made a snide remark about how gay Bunker’s costume was. Interestingly, it turned out that you could suspend a man in mid-air with bricks. Bart hadn’t known that was possible.

“Listen.” Miguel had said, anger wiping away the smirk from the researcher’s face. “I choose what to wear, and it has nothing to do with who I’d like to go out with. Don’t use my sexuality as an insult, _gringo_.”

Bart still didn’t know what that last word meant, but it clearly wasn’t complimentary.

Once they’d gotten over the awkward flirting (alright, so Miguel was fine at flirting. Bart wasn’t), they’d dated for about two months, just mucking around together and seeing what they wanted. It had been fun, kisses and movies and finding a certain place near Miguel’s hip that produced very interesting noises, but it hadn’t been enough for either of them. They liked each other well enough, but they’d kinda just… drifted apart, eventually, and found that being friends was way easier than dating, although the drifting apart thing hadn’t stopped there. Occasionally Miguel would call him from weird places in Mexico to come clubbing, and once they’d gotten spectacularly drunk off their asses and woken up naked together, but mostly, just friends. This was the first time he’d heard from Bunker in a month.

The message didn’t exactly sound world-endingly urgent, but Bart had nothing else on. So, checking the little uncorrupted village one last time, the brunette turned his back, and sped down off the rock, through the short flashes of gaps in the trees, to the water’s edge and its flat surface to run on.

It took minutes to find his way back out of the jungle, then seconds as he sped up on the open ocean to run to the thin strip of land gripping North and South America together. Land took longer to run on, but came with the assurance that if he had to stop for some reason, he wouldn’t start sinking. Hot and dry, then irrigated and green, transforming to wet and stormy, then to steamy and drying as he burst through the edge of a cold front and the rain that had gathered there, and obeyed the instructions on his phone, finding his way to Mexico City.

The sprawling mass of people’s lives was freaking huge. No matter what speed he ran through it at, the fact was that here were a thousand places Miguel could be, a million hidden corners or illogical turns of side streets that suddenly turned into the main road. The speedster got out his phone and went through it’s more un-roadlegal options, but he was saved from the search by a very loud yell.

Pity he had no idea what the guy was saying.

However, everyone round him could, in fact, speak the language, and there was a surge as the crowd pushed and pulled, swarming around a fairly battered television set. The volume was amped up, which still didn’t help you if you were from Central City and were only checking in on a friend, but the sound of explosions was a fairly universal indication of some things. Hanging around the people that Bart hung around with, you became a connoisseur of explosions, and those ones were too regular, too precise for the yelps of shock that they caused.

Common courtesy could go to hell. He pushed to the front of the crowd, and took in the scene beyond the panicked and retreating reporter’s shoulder.

Miguel. Of course. He could send a text, but apparently he was completely unable to mention that it was a supervillain attack, not a tourist destination that he wanted to show off. The bad guy in question looked half-dead, or like one of those zombies that were supposed to scare you on TV, grey and pale and sunken, eyes glowing yellow.  His costume just appeared to be a yellow green thing, massive and indistinct, and a helmet with yellow stripes.

He didn’t need to hear anymore. Even if he couldn’t understand the language. Whatever, the point still stood. Bart spun and shoved his way back out of the crowd, racing away before the people could start on the rude stranger in their midst.

Miguel was doing badly. Bricks were useful, but the grey fellow had this lovely, charming ability to blast them out of the air, which was just _perfect_. Bart arrived just in time to see Bunker lob another slab at grey person’s head, and have is disappear in mid-air, reduced to mist at grey villain’s counterattack, a beam of light thrown from his head that didn’t look fun.

Well. He was and would ever be the servant of irony. And in service to that most capricious of ladies, Bart got a real brick, torn loose from a house, and smashed it against grey person’s head.

Grey person did not like that. In fact, it would be fair to say, grey person was definitely not in favour of it, lobbying against it, voting the negative, vetoing the very idea of say, conveniently falling unconscious, by swinging around to focus on Bart instead.

Damnit. Why was it that whenever he hit someone with masonry, he just pissed them off, but if Batgirl or Red Robin did it, it was suddenly this magical piece of flowing fighting choreography? Unfair. Majorly unfair. What did he have to do to get into that club; he’d already got the dead parents (sort of) the life trauma and the weird obsession with devoting himself to the endless pursuit of (unattainable) justice. Give him a batarang and he’d fit right in.

The blasting headbeam that grey guy gave him in return for the brick bash took out the side of a house, which either meant that he’d really pissed grey guy off and that was the limit of his powers, or that he’d sort of pissed grey guy off and that was grey guy getting into stride, ready to see if he could squish Bart like the bug bad guys invariably thought he was. Bart got out of the way.

“Hey Miguel.” Bart greeted his friend cheerily, rocking on his feet as grey guy started blasting the rubble from the building, probably searching for a white and red superhero under the wall from the outhouse.

The reply he got wasn’t in either Reach chitter or English, so he had no idea what was being said. Miguel was sweating, his costume torn and dirty with the dust of the brawl and his eyes wide with panic.

 “English.” Bart stressed. “Dude, chill.”

Going by his tone, those were swear words.

 “Again, um, Bunker. Spanish. I do not understand the talky. English. We both speak it. There is a simple solution here.” Kid Flash looked over at the headbeam-grey-guy. “I need a better name for him. Do you have a name for him?”

“A _name_?!”

“Oh good, a language that I can speak. What’s up, M- Bunker.”

“I don’t know his name!”

“Dude, everything’s crash, calm-“

“HE JUST APPEARED OUT OF NOWHERE!”

“-down, seriously-“

“I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT WANTS!”

“-aaaaaand now the villain’s turning around againgreatjob.” He tugged Bunker back behind a building, and pressed the other man’s shoulder to the wall when he made to duck out and poke his stupid inexperienced head around the corner. “No. You, stay. Incidentally, next time don’t bother with the whole text message. A simple ‘help’ will be perfect, and make me less likely to think that I’m attending a dinner party rather than a battle.”

“Even now,” Miguel panted, but it sounded saner, so Bart counted it as progress, “you crack jokes?”

“Wit is the sparkle of life.” Kid Flash said sardonically, trying to raise an eyebrow as he snapped up a hand to his ear. “This is Kid Flash. Mel, Nightwing, anyone, you read me? I’lleventakethegoddamnbatmanrightnow.”

“ _Kid Flash?_ ” Nightwing’s voice was clear in his ear, as reassuring as the image of him standing in front of the transparent screens, watching Bart’s back. “ _What’s happening? Why do you sound worried?_ ”

There was an explosion, something set off by or used against the grey guy, and Bart winced behind his goggles, feeling the stuff his protective lenses were made of press into the flesh of his cheek.

“ _I heard that._ ” Nightwing said, before he could ask. “ _How much backup, and where?_ ”

“Mexico City, I don’t know where, but considering the damage, and the media, you won’t have trouble finding us.”

“ _Us?_ ”

He hummed his acknowledgement as he started patting Bunker over, looking for any more obvious injuries.

_“Civilians?_ ”

“No, metahuman, goesbyBunker, we’ve met him before.”

“ _He helpful?_ ” In the background, he could hear the sounds of activity, and a shift as Nightwing switched to the earpiece set into his own costume.

“He’s the one who called me in, boss, not the other way around.”

The connection cut off, and snapped back into place. “ _We’ve arrived from Zeta tube. En route to you now._ ”

“Great. Kid Flash out.”

Miguel looked up from the ground tiredly. “Do I get to meet Superman now then? Makes all this worth it, doesn’t it?”

“My backup’s rather less famous and rather closer to our age. Come on, get up.”

“ _Mierda_. I’ve been thrown around by this jerk for ages, amorcito, can’t I rest?” The protest was half-hearted, but the sentiment behind it as pure as any of the ideals the Justice League fought for.

“Nope. People need us.”

“Great.” Bunker’s hands slid into fists, and glowed purple as he levered himself up. “Well then-”

If he said anything more, Bart didn’t hear it. He leapt back into the fray, a streak of red and yellow, and kicked the grey guy’s head, hard, before retreating to what he deemed a safe distance, and what any person with an active sense of self-preservation would call suicidal. A volley of purple bricks followed him up, bouncing off the grey guy as the man shielded his head with his arms before coming to rest on the ground and fading away into nothingness.

Grey guy did not like that. In fact, the mere fact that he’d left Kid Flash and Bunker alone to recuperate was fishy, suspicious, slightly off, whatever you wanted to call it. It was like he was just going for the targets that caused the most destruction, but there wasn’t enough time, even for Bart, to do more than note that and dodge as his attacks centred back on them and not the surrounding neighbourhood.

Miguel raised a shield and strained, holding the grey villain in a jumpsuit back as Bart circled round. The bashing-grey-guy’s-head-in-with-brick tactic failed again, but when the speedster followed it up with a sharp, tripping kick, he at least managed to knock the criminal over. From there, the world descended into hitting and darting backwards and forwards and side to side, dodging and ducking and grunts when a punch thrown by his opponent connected, and then ducking another blast and tying to twist grey guy’s arm behind his back.

Miguel helped, but he was tired. Honestly, without any sort of formal training or experience and taken by surprise, it was pretty amazing he’d even lasted whatever time it had taken for Bunker to summon Bart and for Bart to run there. The effort of it was showing, the bricks fading faster, his reactions slower, and with the instinctive intelligence of a predator, the grey energy villain turned his attention away from the speedy hero he couldn’t hit, and to the hero that he’d already fought and tested, the one weakened and easier to hit.

“You bootlicking cock sucking shit sittingferret wearing balls dropping STUPID WOOD PLANT HANGING-“

Bart loved Cassie, he thought distantly, watching her tackle grey guy into a now completely unstable construction. Even if her swearing was a cross between sailor talk and what you’d hear a powerpuff girl say if it stubbed a toe. Over in the corner, Miguel started laughing, slightly hysterical. Hearing Wonder Girl swear had that effect on people.

A bird slipped out of the sky. “Okay, I feel vaguely embarrassed that _that_ was the first thing you saw.” He said, transforming back into a human for a moment before launching forward as a green striped tiger, snarling.

Another brick wall came up, and this one wavered, like the caster wasn’t sure if he should be defending the tiger and the flying madwoman or defending against them. Bart didn’t blame him. But having bricks thrown at Wonder Girl and Beast Boy wouldn’t help, so he zipped over to Bunker. “They’re on our side.” He explained quickly.

“Your teammates are mad.”

“I know.” When he heard the yelp as Wonder Girl got blasted into a metal lamppost, he was off again, leaving Miguel to hopefully stay behind his shield.

It was undeniably easier to fight with Beast Boy and Wonder Girl by his side. They were fresh, energised and not worn down by fighting like Miguel had been, but it was more than that. They were experienced together, they had fought together through fire and ice and gooey green stuff that no one was sure how to reproduce, against magic and science and brute strength, and if there was one thing that Bart knew how to do, it was fight. Especially with those people, people he’d trained with for years, had snowball fights and popcorn wars and capture the flag grudges against. Miguel didn’t qualify as a stranger, but he wasn’t one of the Team.

Thinking of his teammates… “Where the hell is Nightwing?” He yelled as Wonder Girl snatched him up from an unstable perch on what, at one time, he’d guess had been a barbeque.

She spun around, holding him by the scruff of his neck and deflecting a blast from the grey guy with the other arm. “No idea! We flew on ahead, they should be here!”

“Beast Boy?”

“Graph!” The emerald creature agreed, skidding behind Miguel’s shield.

“Perfect.” He groaned, and sped off as Wonder Girl let him down. She charged the supervillain, and there was a momentary reprieve as blonde-haired and dying-skin started pounding away at each other. He lifted his hand to his ear again. “Team leader? Want to, y’know, come lead us right now? Because we aren’t moded yet, but-“

“ _Bart we can’t. Batgirl and I have found a large group of armed thugs, and they’re headed toward your position._ ” Oh, that was just PERFECT.

“ _I think they might be the gang that control this turf._ ” Batgirl interjected.

“ _We’re following them, we’ll see if we can stop them, but we can’t help you Bart._ ” Nightwing said softly.

“Fat lot of good you are.”

“ _We can’t help you, doesn’t mean you’re on your own. I’ll see who I can call.”_

“That’s slightly more reassuring.” There was a crack as a particularly volatile blast ricocheted, glancing off Bunker’s shield and causing Bunker to grit his teeth.

The green tiger bounded back out of the shelter again, and Bart followed Beast Boy, shutting off the connection. He tried grabbing a sheet of sort-of-reflective metal and tried reflecting the energy back to the grey skinned villain, but what TV and movies didn’t tell you was that apparently, when you tried to do that, your makeshift mirror melted. Or maybe he was just using the wrong bit of roofing to do it.

Back they went into the dance of hitting things and being hit, the world alternately slowing down and speeding up as he shifted gears into and out of superspeed, ducking and weaving. At some point, there was sound across the communicators, but it was distorted and made strange by his shifting speed. It was speech, but that was all he could tell absorb.

So he was understandably surprised when the next time he got swung up into the air, it wasn’t braceleted hands and whooping voice that carried him, but humming blue armour and moving metal. “Blue!”

Blue Beetle tipped himself in the air, grinning down at him. “You should’ve called, ese. I didn’t want to miss this party.”

“Yeah, crash, now put me down dude.” Bart complained.

“No way.” Another new voice caught his attention, Miss Martian hovering in the air with a green kitten on her shoulder. She and Jaime must have arrived while he wasn’t paying attention, presumably. “We’ve been ordered to evacuate temporarily. There are armed men are advancing on this position, and Nightwing and Batgirl haven’t been able to steer them away.”

“Evacuate… M-Bunker!”

“M-Bunker?” Jaime repeated.

“The guy who called me in in the first place,” Bart gestured frantically, or as frantically as he was able to in Jaime’s arms.

“Don’t _worry_ , Bart.” Miguel voice came from over Jaime’s shoulder. Obligingly, Blue Beetle turned so that Bart could see Bunker, being held like a fainting bride by a very pleased Wonder Girl.

“Look what I found!” She chirped. “Can I keep him? I’ll feed him and take him for walks and give him baths and everything!”

“Wonder Girl…” Miss Martian groaned. On her shoulder, Beast Boy meowed in agreement.

“He can sleep at the foot of my bed!” Cassie suggested cheerily, and Miguel made a face.

“Wonder Girl!”

“What?!”

“ _Armed. Gunmen._ ” Miss Martian hissed.

“…Oh, yeah, right.”

“If you’re finished?”

“Oh, I’ve only just-“

“ _Wonder Girl_.”

“Fine.”

“We need to land and meet up with Nightwing and Batgirl.” The Martian woman said, looking relieved.

“They’re over there.” Blue Beetle put in. “I’m tracking their comm units.”

Happily, Blue took them over quickly, because Bart never liked feeling like a sack of potatoes. Jaime insisted that carrying him around was hilariously funny and-slash-or necessary, but Bart was faster than him. He should be on the ground; he should be running, even if there was that time in Norway with the Scandinavians. Point was: Feet not on ground. Feet should be on ground. Thus, he was fairly pleased about being set down next to the two Bats, skipping aside to let Wonder Girl relinquish Bunker.

“Only you,” Batgirl remarked offhand, “could go running and find a supervillain.”

“I’d like to point out that we find supervillains all the freaking time, and that we don’t usually need to go for a run to find one.” He said reasonably, stealing her binocular thingy.

“Yes, but we don’t usually get stuck in a gunfight with a gang.”

“Actually we kinda do that too.” Blue Beetle pointed out.

“Not both at the same time.” Nightwing ended the banter. “We have multiple groups converging on Atomic Skull-“

“Oh so THAT’S what he’s called!”

“Shut up, Kid Flash. Anyway, multiple groups coming down on Atomic Skull. From the way they’re interacting and what we’ve seen of what their wearing, they’re all from the same gang. We’ve identified some pretty heavy duty guns, but most of its bog-standard stuff.”

“If some super comes pounding into their turf, they’re gunna get out the best they’ve got, I think.” Bunker interjected.

Nightwing looked him over. “What name you going by?”

“Not my real one, although I know you know it.”

“Yeah, we have a file on you. What name?”

“Bunker.”

“Fine. Tell us how this started.”

“Honestly?” Miguel spread his hands. “I have no idea. Heard about the destruction some guy was wrecking, I was in town, thought I might help. Found him, got into costume, texted Bart and got beat up until he arrived.”

“Any idea why Atomic Skull is in Mexico?”

“Nada. There’s been more supers around this part of the world lately, but…” He shrugged, trailing off.

“I’ll need more information later. Blue, where are the groups of combatants?”

Jaime’s eyes turned orange, scanning. “Atomic Skull’s wrecking stuff, all groups of the gang that I can track are pretty close to him, I think-“

The first gunshot sounded out, an explosion different yet at once similar to the blasts from grey-guy-Atomic-Skull. The second followed half a moment later, and then it was like a sudden rainshower, peppereed with a few battle cries and seasoned with a combined expression of resignation and irritation from the members of the Team. Miguel just looked tired.

“Perfect. Batgirl, Beast Boy, Kid Flash and I will take care of the men shooting. Miss Martian, Wonder Girl, and Blue Beetle, you go after Atomic Skull. Bunker, you aren’t under my command, but if you could make something like a fence, that would be great. Don’t let anyone escape.”

“Aye.” Bunker agreed. “I can try that.”

“Alright. Let’s get this contained.”

Batgirl and Nightwing moved fluidly into action, simultaneously leaping and melting into the shadows. Beast Boy turned into some other sort of bird (Bart honestly couldn’t tell the difference) and flitted up into the sky, joined by Blue Beetle, Miss Martian, and a manically grinning Wonder Girl. Bart gave Miguel a quick nod, and then sped away.

Whoever those guys were, they had no experience with supers. Grabbing guns from them was as easy as pie, and Bart even had time to think about how that simile made absolutely no sense before they realised their loss and began to panic without their weapons. He took down a few of them, but then the rest gathered that he was there and formed up into a circle, like buffalo against a lion. Bart wasn’t a lion (if anything, he had to be a cheetah), so he left that to Beast Boy, wherever he was, and moved on to the next group.

The guns he scavenged he threw toward the Atomic Skull guy, figuring that it was the one place that the non-metahumans wouldn’t go to get them back. He got lost in the maze of sidestreets for a couple of seconds before he found the next lot, and then it was back into the new routine, disarm, frighten, knock a couple of them out.

The last group he found was devoid of guns, the men strung up and hogtied. Batgirl was just finishing with the most recently knocked out criminal. “How’re we doing?” he asked quickly.

She tapped her mask, presumably activating something inside. “Five groups down. One to go, but Beast Boy and Nightwing are both working on it.”

“I got two.” He gloated.

“Amazing. I also got two, despite the fact that I can’t break the sound barrier.” She raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, yeah, Bats rule the world.” Leaving Batgirl to her rope knots, he grabbed the guns she’d liberated and ran with them, back toward the rubble epicentre of Atomic Skull’s stay in the neighbourhood.

Atomic Skull himself was stapled to a wall, neck held down with blue metal so that he couldn’t turn his head and free himself, the battle clearly over. Miss Martian was starting clean up, piles of shifting rubble rearranging themselves and helpfully settling down in neat stacks, and Wonder Girl was in front of the villain, bracelets held forward, alert and on guard.

“All good?” Bart called.

“Si.” Jaime landed behind him. “The police are on their way. I think Nightwing has an inhibitor collar, but I don’t know. If we don’t have a collar we definitely can’t move him.” His friend looked him over. “Why were you in Mexico, Bart?” He wrinkled his nose. “And why do you smell like swamp?”

“I got a text from, erm, Bunker.”

“The guy in purple?”

“Like you can talk.”

“Hey, I didn’t pick my armour out! And anyway, this guy has your phone number? He knows your secret id? You sure you can trust him?”

“What’s with all the questions?” Bart tried to copy Batgirl’s eyebrow raise, but it felt stupid. “Look, yeah, he knows who I am. But it’s crash, Blue, I know him, I can trust him.”

“You’ve never told me about him before.” Jaime narrowed his eyes. “How long have you known him, anyway?”

“A year? Something like that, look, Blue, _Jaime_ , don’t worry. I don’t hear from him that often any more, but he’s not a bad guy.” He reassured.

“How do you know? And why-“

“Good work, team.” Nightwing walked out of one of the gaps between building that may-or-may-not have been there before they arrived, and Kid Flash elbowed Blue to get him to shut up. Thankfully, it worked. “Now, the police vans are arriving, media too. Grab the men you took down and bring them here, they can be taken away for the courts to deal with.”

Tossing out a quick salute, Bart sped off back into the maze of streets, relieved. While he wasn’t exactly ashamed of having only slept with other guys in his life so far, he knew it wasn’t something that the people of this time period necessarily reacted well to. So he hadn’t told anybody. Yet. Really, he meant to, he really, really did, but he hadn’t gone out with anyone for long enough to introduce them to his friends, and Miguel was the only one who he’d ever revealed his secret identity to, all joking about why he didn’t need one aside.

He was kinda running out of reasons not to tell his family though.

He hauled the unconscious, tied up, or just extremely petrified gunmen without guns to Nightwing’s feet, and the police van arrived. Their glorious leader began talking to them in Spanish, presumably trying to explain the surrounding destruction without it sounding like it was their fault. In all fairness, this time, it wasn’t, so Bart didn’t think that they’d be too angry that someone just did their jobs for them.

Batgirl slipped out to join them, giving directions to her own captives, and Beast Boy followed soon after, a gorilla holding two men while behind him, three others lay on purple floating bricks. Bunker, bringing up the rear, put those men on the ground before coming over to join Bart and the others.

“I had to lower the blockade to let the vans through,” he said. “I think some of the men escaped.”

Miss Martian turned to him, her expression sympathetic. “We got most of them. And more importantly, we got their guns.”

“Yes, well, you, I-“ Bunker seemed to struggle with something for a second. “I just wanted to say- thank you. I-I couldn’t deal with the dead-looking person, let alone all the gunmen on top of that.”

“His name’s Atomic Skull.” Nightwing put in, and Bart watching the resulting jump from Miguel with a small grin. It had taken him ages to get used to Nightwing’s habit of appearing out of nowhere in plain sight. “We first met him fighting with the Injustice League as a cover for the Light. I’m not sure why he came here, but we’ll investigate. This isn’t his usual stomping ground.”

“He also didn’t seem to have any target. Just random destruction.” Batgirl noted. “That isn’t his usual M.O either.”

“Any idea why, Bunker?” Bart recognised the easy slip into interrogation mode.

“None, um, sir.” He looked at Nightwing. “I don’t even live here. I was just in town and I saw the news camera’s covering the event. Like I said, got into costume and texted Bart, and then tried to stop him.”

“Well… you did good. For someone with no training. I need to report this in to the Watchtower,” Nightwing said, “the police are dealing with the gang members, but we might need to take Atomic Skull with us.” He moved off, activating the little pop up screen on his wrist and talking into it.

Bunker watched him go, looking slightly confused, and turned back to the group. “Um… so yeah. Like I said, thank you all for your help.”

Beast Boy shrugged, the tip of his tail flicking the air. “No prob, dude. We wouldn’t have even known to come if Bart hadn’t called it in.”

Bunker smiled, the muscles on his face loosening from what they had been, and clapped Bart on the shoulder. “Then gracias, amorcito, you-“

Blue stepped forward suddenly. “[You shouldn’t call him that, it’s inappropriate.] No deberias llamarlo eso. Es impropio.”He said without warning.

“Oh, you speak Spanish? [What’s the problem?] Que es el problema?”

“[You are.] Tu.” Huh. Bart would have thought that Jaime would have been pleased to find another hero who could speak his language, but that tone wasn’t friendly. “[You can’t call Bart that.] No puedes decirle eso a Bart.”

Miguel frowned. “[Why on earth not?] Y porque no?”

“[He doesn’t know Spanish! He doesn’t know what you’re implying!] No sabe espanol. No va saber lo que estas impliando.”

“[Yes, but-] Si, pero-”

“[You can’t call him amorcito, you don’t have any right to! Even if he doesn’t speak Spanish, that isn’t something you call your friends.] Tampoco no debes llamarlo amorcito! Si no habala espanol, no es algo llamarle a tus amigos.”

“[Hey, I have every right! I-] Oye, yo tengo todo el derecho! Yo-”

“[No you don’t!] No, no lo tienes!” Blue stepped forward and poked Bunker’s chest, while Bart looked around in increasing confusion. “[You don’t have any right, you can’t call him that! Its ungrateful, that’s what it is, Bart just saved your skin!] No tienes el derecho llamarlo asi! Es desagradable, es lo que es! Bart te salvo tu vida!”

Bart sidestepped nearer to Batgirl. “Um… what are they on about?”

“[I’m not insulting him! Of course I can call him that if I want to, you can’t stop me!] No lo estoy insultando! Porsupuesto que puedo llamarlo asi si puedo, no me puedes parar.” Bunker retorted, taking a step back and clenching his fists.

“I have no idea.” Batgirl said, her tone irritated and puzzled.

“But… you bat-people speak a ton of languages.” He said, confused. “Don’t you know Spanish?”

“I do, but they aren’t speaking Spanish. Or at least, not Spanish how it’s spoken in Spain. Too fast, not similar enough to what I learnt.” She explained.

“[I can stop you; I’ll tell him what it means!] Si puedo; voy a transluir todo lo que dices!” Jaime was nearly shouting now.

“Wait, so you can’t… M’gann.” Bart switched his focus to her. “You can translate _anything_.”

“Yes, but it needs a mindlink. I don’t think they want that right now, I can’t invade their privacy.” She grimaced. “Sorry.”

“What the hell set them off?” Beast Boy groaned. “We were doing fine!”

“[He won’t bloody care, you idiot!] Nisiquiera le va importar, idiota!” Bunker snapped.

“[Oh I think he will.] Oh you pienso que si” Jaime growled a retort. “[I think he’ll just love to know that you’ve been flirting with him without his knowledge, _insulting_ him-]Y yo pienso que le va gustar saber que tu lo estabas coquetiando sin el sabiendo, insultandolo-”

Nightwing stalked up, glaring. “What’s happened now?”

“We don’t know,” came the general chorus.

“[Without his knowledge? Insulting him?! Give me a break, stop being an idiot!] Sin el sabiendo? Por favor, para de ser una idiota.” Bunker shouted.

“[You are! You can’t just-] Tu! No puedes-”

“[I can! I’m able to! And even if Bart did know what I was saying he wouldn’t care!] Lo puedo, y voy. Y si Bart sabia lo que le digo, no le importara!”

“[You don’t just get to decide that!] No tienes el derecho de decidir eso!” Jaime shouted, the armour bristling along his shoulder blades. “[Whoever you are, you can’t just-]Lo quien sea, no puedes hacer-”

Bunker narrowed his eyes and pushed forward, voice overriding Blue Beetle’s. “[He is my ex-boyfriend, alright?!] Es my ex-novio, OK?!”

 Jaime froze, and made a weird squawking noise.

“[I am allowed to call him that.] Se me permite llamarlo así.” Bunker said, lifting his chin. “Cálmate. [Calm down.]”

Jaime made the squeaking noise again, and this time Bart decided it was more like the sound a little baby bunny would make if you trod on its fluffy tiny tail.

Nightwing came forward to glare at them both, taking advantage of the strange pause. “Are you done then?” He said with an edge of anger in his voice.

Bunker nodded, looking over at Blue Beetle from the side of his eye. “We just had a… misunderstanding.” He said carefully. “It was nothing. All cleared up now.”

“Well then.” Their leader in black glared at them, suspicious. “It better be.”

“Si. Sorry, sir. I don’t mean to cause you any trouble.”

Nightwing shifted his gaze to Blue Beetle, but when nothing came of it, accepted the silence as agreement. Meanwhile, Bart was completely lost. “I won’t pretend I understood any of that. But if you’re working with us, you need to work with us.”

Bunker looked down, chastened. Nightwing gave him a quick look and turned away, once again booting up his wrist computer to report into whoever was minding the Watchtower. With that signal, the rest of the Team blinked, and went over to the two of them, tentative. Bart dragged Blue Beetle away, but when no words were forthcoming, left him staring at a wall to go see if Miguel had any explanation.

“So, energy constructs.” Batgirl slid into conversation like it was a subject that they’d been musing upon not five minutes ago that they’d just decided to pick back up, and not like they’d all just witnessed a very public argument about who-knows-what. “Any relation to Green Lantern?”

“Er… no?” Miguel shrugged.

“Any other sort of Lantern?”

“Wait, there are more?” He screwed up his face.

“What can you make?!” Beast Boy asked, pouncing on the subject change.

 “I can make walls, stairs, a surface to fly on… and hit people in the head with bricks.” Bunker grinned, a less sure, less confident, less real grin then before, but a smile nonetheless. “That’s useful.”

“Oh, he will do.” Wonder Girl grinned, predatory and Bart turned to see where she came from. “Smart, nice… and hot. That one’s important. We could,” she latched on to his arm, in the way that Cassie had, always pushing and pushy, “find some place to put him. Like, my room?”

Batgirl raised her eyebrows. “Down girl. And weren’t you watching our supervillain?”

“Blue’s doing it for me.” She said.

“Actually, I think he’s just gazing into the distance vacantly.” Bart pointed out. “The supervillain just happens to be in his way.”

“To- _may_ -to, to- _mah_ -to. Same thing. But I want this one in my room.” Cassie grinned, suggestive.

“If you wanted to take me away for more questions, you could put me in her room if you wanted.” Miguel said, looking a little out of his depth, and Bart could just see Miss Martian and Batgirl reassessing him as a threat. “Of course,” he slipped out of Wonder Girl’s hold, and took a step backwards, “nothing would come of it.”

“Yeah, because if there is one thing we trust young men to do, it’s keep it in their pants.” Batgirl retorted.

“Oh, you can trust me not to touch her.” Bunker said confidently, and Bart facepalmed. That was _not_ the right thing to say.

“Exactly!” Wonder Girl made another playful leap at him, and Bunker dodged. “We won’t have sex!”

“We certainly won’t, little torbellino.” He got up and dusted himself off. “I am gay, after all.”

Jaime made another chirping noise. Or maybe he said something and it was distorted by the suit. Bart would leave the second one open as an excuse for him.

Wonder Girl skidded to a halt with an over-exaggerated pout. “What?”

“You could,” Bunker said, reassuring, “trust me not to try anything, with anyone, no matter what gender. It would be horrible of me to do so while in your home. But yes, I am only attracted to other men.”

“I officially have the worst gaydar in the world. Seriously, so you like cock?”

Miss Martian blinked. “Wonder Girl!”

“What?!”

“Um…” Bunker leant away from Wonder Girl. “Yes?”

“Hell yeah!” She smirked. “We could start a club.”

Bunker looked round for a rescue. “Eh…”

“I could make t-shirts.” She suggested, innocent as the devil itself.

“Oh, good lord.” Batgirl covered her face with the fingers of one delicately gloved hand. “Someone get him out of there. The last thing she needs is encouragement.”

Bart didn’t say anything, but it was hard to think of a reason not to agree. 

 


	3. Part 2

 

Miguel managed to detangle himself from Wonder Girl when she was sent to Zeta home and come back with an inhibitor collar. Nightwing and Batgirl were playing detectives, Jaime was still staring at the wall, and Miss Martian and Beast Boy had both turned into cats to avoid being asked any questions by either the police, or one of the news crews currently pointing their cameras at Atomic Skull and the accompanying police vans with pretty reporters talking in rapid Spanish. Bart didn’t blame them. Turning into something without the right vocal chords was a very effective strategy to avoid interviews. Both brother and sister were sunning themselves on a rock.

He took his chance, and pounced, grabbing Bunker by the arm and pulling him aside, into an only moderately rubble filled alleyway that seemed to be the best option available that was structurally sound. “I guess you wanna explain what that was about?” He asked pointedly.

“Er…” The glances that Bunker gave off, left and right, looking for an escape route, did not bode well.

“The argument, Miguel. What got you two so moded with each other?”

His ex-boyfriend rubbed the back of his neck distractedly. “The guy in the blue armour didn’t like something I said, I guess.”

“You’ve barely said an entire sentence within his hearing! That doesn’t make sense.”

Bunker just looked uncomfortable.

Suspicions raised, Bart thought back. “What did you say before he started with the Spanish? ‘Gracias, amorcito?’”

“Uh, yeah…”

“Gracias means thank you, doesn’t it? Even I know that one. Why would he freak out over that?”

“It, er, wasn’t the gracias bit.” Miguel admitted.

“What, amorcito? You gave me that nickname ages ago. Why’d Blue go nuts over it now?”

Bunker fidgeted.

“….Miguel.”

“Fine. It’s a nickname that’s usually only given to someone if you’re dating them.” He admitted. “In English it means ‘little love’.”

While that explained some stuff, it didn’t account for everything, not by a long shot. “Well, that’s… adorable, actually, but why would Blue get upset about that?”

Bunker looked up, surprised. “Isn’t he your boyfriend?”

“Um, NO. I’ve been friends with Blue forever, but he isn’t gay, and he certainly doesn’t know I am.” Bart rolled his eyes.

“Shit.”

“I do not like that tone. What.”

“I may have… the thing is… I think… and he was shouting at me, so…”

“What. Miguel.”

“I think I might have outed you.” Miguel said in a rush, words tripping over each other.

Bart felt his face go pale. “WHAT?!”

“I’m sorry, Bart! He was going on and on about how I didn’t have any right to call you that nickname, with that and the way he was looking at me, I thought he was yours, y’know?!”

“Oh god, FUCK!” Bart wheeled away from him, spinning and grabbing on to his hair. “Fuck, Miguel! Don’t you think there was a reason I didn’t tell him!”

“I didn’t know!” Miguel threw up his own hands. “You- Bart you don’t seem like you’re ashamed of being gay. I thought those guys would know!”

“I’m not _ashamed_.” He spat. “I’m perfectly fine with who I am, but they might not be! I come from a very different place; I’m not sure what it’s like here!”

“It can’t be that different-“

He rounded on his friend. “Believe me,” Bart snarled, “it is. Was. Will be. Fuck.”

“I… Bart I’m _sorry_.” Bunker said helplessly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I really didn’t. I just wanted him to stop shouting at me.”

“Well,” Bart ran a hand through his hair, and laughed, “you certainly accomplished that. I think you broke Blue Beetle. Congratulations.”

“I- do you really think they’ll react _that_ badly? Are they all homophobic or something? Because they don’t seem to be.”

He sighed. “I- no… I haven’t seen anything that suggests they would be…”

“Then how do you know they’ll react badly, amorcito?” Bunker clapped his hand over his mouth. “Sorry, sorry, I won’t do that.”

“I don’t care if you call me amurcit-o.” He closed his eyes, leaning back tiredly as he mangled the innocent word. “And I don’t know how they’ll react. That’s the problem. It might change nothing, it might change everything, I just don’t _know_. I’ve got absolutely no context for this sort of thing. I’ve avoided the subject for four years because... because this is my LIFE, Miguel. It’s everything. These people are my friends, my family, pretty much my entire world.”

“And you have avoided telling them that you’re gay.”

“…Yes.”

“For four years.”

“…Yes? In fairness, I might be bisexual; I just haven’t found any girls attractive yet.”

“Oh, honestly.”

“What?”

Miguel smiled at him, like he was missing something obvious, although it was hesitant and careful. “They are your friends. Your family. Pretty much your entire world.” He put his hand on Bart’s shoulder. “Short of becoming a supervillain, if they love you like you say, there is nothing you can do to make them stop.”

His snark instincts kicked in. “Actually, I know a girl –she’s um, kinda been kidnapped and adopted into our family- who’s  real family are mostly Supervillains. They still love each other, even if it’s in a really weird and messed up way.”

“See?”

“Hold on, why am I supporting your point?”

“Because Bart,” he squeezed the speedster’s shoulder, “you know that it is right. Even if the, um, circumstances were a little… not ideal, let’s call it, your friend in the blue armour will not hold it against you. Against me? Almost certainly. I am fairly sure he hates me.”

“No one could hate you Miguel, not even if you tried. You’re a nice person.”

“I think you might be a little biased. Besides, it is what I deserve.” His face turned serious. “I did not mean to reveal anything you chose to hide.”

“It’s, um, it’s okay.” It wasn’t. But hopefully it might be. Jaime was… Jaime was his friend, his best friend, and he was kind, and loyal, and could give Superman a run for his money in kitten saving skills. It would be fine. _It would be fine_. “I can’t believe you thought he was my boyfriend!” Crap. He’d defaulted back to the silly inane joking.

“Well, it did seem like it. Why else would he be so possessive? It is a guy under that metal, right?”

“Yeah, duh.”

“And you have a crush on him.”

 Bart widened his eyes, and spoke out. “I do _not_ have a crush on Blue Beetle.”

“But you might have a crush on the person under the mask.”

“What the _hell_ makes you say that?!”

Bunker looked at him, undiminished. “Bart, I went out with you for two months. I have seen the way you act around a guy you like, and you are way closer to the Blue guy than you ever were to me.”

“We’ve been friends for years!”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t have a crush on him.”

“No, Miguel.” Bart snapped. “But it does mean that I can be close to him, and like him, _without_ wanting to sleep with him.”

“But you-“

“ _Drop it._ ” He hissed violently.

“Okay, alright, calmarse, I’m shutting up now.” Miguel held up his hands defensively. “I’m sorry for asking, yeah?”

“Hmm.” Bart grumbled.

“Really. I am sorry.” And he knew Bunker wasn’t talking about the bad Jaime-crush joke.

“It would have come out eventually.” He reasoned with himself. “It would have... it’s better… well, not better, but… I really need to talk to him.”

“You probably do.” Miguel agreed, his voice softer. “Look, we can talk some other time. You go talk to your blue friend, Bart.”

He gave up an unintentionally sardonic smile. “This is all completely your fault.”

 The twist of lips he received in return was sad, and gentle. “Yes. It is. I will… I will make it up to you, Bart. I didn’t mean to force you into… whatever it is you’re doing.”

The speedster shrugged. Did or didn’t mean to, on purpose or not, it really didn’t matter. It had happened, and he would deal with it, and that was the way of the world. “We’ll talk some other time then.”

They wandered back out, or rather; Miguel led the way back to police vans and TV crews and chaos while Bart hung back. He did get an odd, assessing look from Batgirl, but if anyone else noticed their absence, they weren’t giving him their opinion of it.

Mostly because they’d left.

Oh, the television people were still running about like chickens with their heads cut off, and the police still were talking with Nightwing, both sides stumbling through the language barrier and occasionally tripping over it and saying something that clearly made no sense to anyone. Batgirl was doing stuff with the guns, analysing or recording or something, though really she could have been giving them an oil change for all Bart knew. Wonder Girl was standing by Atomic Skull, every inch the conquering hero looking down upon the collared and handcuffed villain. But Beast Boy, Miss Martian, and Blue Beetle were gone.

“Where’re Blue and the others?” He asked Batgirl, as casual as he could manage.

“Went back to base.” She said absently, concentrating on her work. “Actually, you’re probably useless to us too, now.”

“Why thank you.”

“Get on out of here, Kid Flash. We can handle things from here, unless you want to go see the city with your friend?” Batgirl looked up at Bunker, the question clear in her eyes.

“Um, no. I’ve got to call my family; they’ll have seen me on the news.” Bunker said hurriedly. “They’re going to want me back home, I’ll see Kid Flash another day.”

She shrugged, and turned back to her work. Bart gave Bunker a smile in half-hearted thanks, and went. The reporters crowding at the edge of a makeshift barrier that someone had put up stirred like flies buzzing round a carcass, holding out microphones and switching on cameras, but they didn’t have a hope. He slipped past them in the space between seconds, and was on his way back to the Zeta tube without any trouble.

Pretty much every major city on the planet had a Zeta tube, tucked into a dead-end alleyway, a rubbish skip or a closed off door or an always empty, always abandoned shed and memorised by the League and the Team, every single location. He knew that the cities that didn’t have Zeta tubes were being quietly, slowly being visited by Wayne Industries. A conference call here, a meet up with the factory there, and if a new Zeta tube happened to go online a month or a year later, no one would think anything of it.

Mexico City’s Zeta tube was an apartment. Ground floor, with its own door, and wide, clean windows that showed an absolutely positively mundane interior. He didn’t know what someone had done to the windows, but there was a good deal more steel and flashing electronics when he made his way inside.

The computer identified him impassively and spirited him away in disorientating swirling light. Bart stepped out into the Watchtower, and looked around. It wasn’t like he expected Jaime to be waiting for him, not really, but he could always have hope, even if the universe didn’t see fit to reward that dream too often.

The only one wandering past was Beast Boy, sandwich griped in his tail as he texted on his phone. He looked up absently, then did a retake and focused in on Bart, to the speedster’s exasperation. “You okay dude? You look… weird.”

“It’s nothing.” He waved it off.

Garfield frowned. “You sure?”

“Nothing that you can help me with, at least.”

“That doesn’t sound, um, very crash.”

“Nope.” He said inattentively. “I’m sort of moded. Do you know where Blue is?”

“Blue?” Bart waited, and when he didn’t say anything else, Beast Boy continued, confused. “No, I don’t think so. Why, you looking for him?”

Kid Flash nodded.

“Um… I think he probably went home? Actually, yeah, I saw him fly out before we Zetaed back here.” Garfield tucked away his phone and took a bite of his food. “Don’t know why he didn’t just Zeta home,” he said between crumbs.

“I think I might.” Bart said unhappily.

A green furred hand caught his arm. “Seriously. You okay?”

“Fine.”

He didn’t look convinced, but Beast Boy let him go, and Kid Flash took off running again, back to the surface of the planet and starting in on the path that Jaime would have taken. It wouldn’t take long to catch him up.

And it didn’t. Blue Beetle was fast, he could even break the sound barrier, but he wasn’t a Flash. From how soon the blue armour appeared in the sky, Bart didn’t think the Jaime was even trying. Just meandering along in the air. He didn’t even notice Kid Flash running down below.

Which meant that Bart got to do his favourite tried-and-true method of getting Blue’s attention mid-flight. He picked up a pebble, ran forward of Blue’s path, and threw it, sending the stone clinking against the armour. Then another small chip of stone, and another, like bouncing pebbles off someone’s window to get their attention, only this window was enclosing the occupant and moving at high speed.

The tell-tale flinch of movement, Blue dodging the projectile, gave him away. But Jaime still didn’t stop, blowing past him in humming movement, and so maybe Blue had noticed Kid Flash after all. Because now he was definitely ignoring him. Bart groaned to himself, and kept pace with the stubborn flyer, occasionally continuing to bounce stones off armour, just for the hell of it. Jaime would have to come down sooner or later, and until then, he could keep up with whatever speed Blue Beetle chose.

It took an hour for that same thought to seemingly occur to Blue Beetle as well, and for the pretty much hopeless fight to be given up. The next town they passed over, Blue slowed, and came to a complete halt above a golf course, an empty one. Considering it was drizzling miserably in this part of the world, Bart could see why no one had thought to wander out to hit a little white ball with a stick. He passed one very determined sportsman and his dejected caddie on his way in, but that was it.

Blue had landed in a little grove of trees, thick enough to hold a million white balls within their clutches and incidentally keep out the rain. Bart came to a stop in front of him. Just to be contrary, as soon as the armour retracted from Jaime’s face, he shook himself, sending the water he’d collected everywhere.

The resulting look of irritation was better than the shock or the ignoring, but it soon faded from Jaime’s face. It left an inscrutable expression on him as he sat down on a fallen tree, the wood bending under him. Bart stayed standing, clasping his hands behind his back as he leant his weight against a tree trunk.

How did one start a conversation like this? “So…”

“So.” Jaime echoed.

“Miguel’s my ex-boyfriend.” Not many people could accuse Bart of subtlety. When Jaime’s head snapped up, he shrugged. “But you already knew that.”

“He told me. Yeah.” Jaime frowned. “But how did you know that? You don’t speak Spanish.”

“Nah, but it’s not like he hates me or anything. I asked him what you guys were arguing about, he told me.” Bart kept his voice light.

“But he's… he’s your ex.” Jaime sounded like he was struggling.

“Yes, he is my ex. It isn’t rocket science, Jaime, but maybe if it was, you’d feel better. Just because dating him didn’t work out doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.” Without meaning to, he felt himself getting defensive, prickling up like a cat with all its hair standing on end.

“But you- you’re…”

Oh good lord, he couldn’t even say it. Bart rolled his eyes. “I am gay. There, I said it out loud. But just because I am homo-rather-than-hetero-sexual does not mean I am going to jump on every ass I see, you idiot. Do you try to flirt with every girl on the Team each time you come into the building? No. I do not flirt with every guy I see either.”

Jaime was silent for a bit when he did start back up talking, it wasn’t even on the same subject. “You’re doing that thing where you talk really slowly.”

“Wait. What?”

“You stop using conjunctions and start talking really slowly. If it gets worse eventually you give up and start talking in a big mess of words at superspeed.” He met Bart’s eyes. “It’s something you do when you’re stressed.”

“So what?” Bart asked, wrong footed and uncomfortable.

“Sorry, it’s just…” Blue took his eyes away from Bart, and turned them up to the blank grey sky. “I know that… that liking whoever you like doesn’t make you a different person. You, hermano, you aren’t any different to the annoying guy in red and yellow that I’ve always known. But…

“I thought that I knew pretty much everything about you, ese. I know about how you hate writing stuff down, unless it’s math, ‘cause you love math but you don’t normally tell anyone that. I know about the thing in Corbec. I know how you start to talk when you’re stressed, how you have to slow yourself down. But…” He gestured absently. “I didn’t know about this.”

“Look, Jaime, you do not need to restructure your entire view of me. Shit, I am not going to start hitting on you or something.”

That got him a glare. “I’m not angry about you being gay, _Bart._ What, you think I’m a homophobe? That I’d hate you? I mean, sure, its…” he shook himself, “I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it, but you’re my _friend_ , okay?  I’m not worried about _that_.”

Which was a relief, but left Bart hanging, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Jaime looked away again, this time dropping his eyes to the ground. “No, I’m just wondering how many other things you aren’t telling me, because as far as I know, I’m one of your best friends.”

Oh, well, it wasn’t like he’d lied about anything important. _Only things like I built the time machine,_ he thought. _I lived a slave. You were there, but not as you. The world was ash. I grew up hearing of the heroes and the way each one fell._ “I’mhidingalot.” He admitted, and then realised the speed of the statement. “I am hiding a lot.”

“I’m starting to get that.” For all the acceptance on the surface of his tone, there was worry underneath, deep and true. “Just… Bart, tell me you have a good reason. Tell me that keeping stuff hidden, that not telling me stuff or lying about it; tell me you have good reasons for that.”

 _I don’t want you to look at me different. I can’t let the future affect the past. There are things that will still happen. Foreknowledge is not forewarning. I am not made by who I was._ “I know Nightwing’s secret identity.” He said finally. “And Batman’s. And Batgirl’s, and Red Robin’s, and-“ _Red Hood_ “-others.”

“So it’s not your secret to tell?”

“Some are. Some are not.”

“I won’t ask.” Jaime said quietly. “I mean… I don’t exactly like it. But I won’t ask.”

Promising to tell him someday would be a lie. Bart didn’t ever intend to expose what his childhood had been like, not if he could help it. The ridiculous, stupid, blind faith that Jaime had in him was astonishing, no guarantees, no back-up plan, just trusting Bart almost immediately after he’d just been told, been _shown_ that Bart had lied to him, that Bart was presumably still doing so.

It was so startlingly, brilliantly human. Jaime, at his core, couldn’t twist the laws of physics or break apart inhibitor collars, but he was so shockingly, distressingly _good_. Kind and gentle and moral and right, so humane it was downright ironic what armour he wore.

Bart swallowed. “Thank you.”

It was weak, and pathetic, and he was pretty sure that this, if anything, proved that he wasn’t worthy of this sort of reflexive trust. But it was the best he could do.


	4. Part 3

“Dun dun duuuuuun.”

Spooky music. Spooky music?

“Dun dun duuuuuun.”

There was something about that that meant something. Something about that that meant something there was. Was. Funny word. Funny letter. W. Double-v, but everyone called it double-u. U was a vowel. Did that make double-u a vowel? It was, Bart thought sleepily, a conundrum.

Conundrum. Nice word.

…What was he thinking about?

“Dun dun duuuuun.” The tinny sound rang out again.

He groaned and reached over to grab the annoyance. His thumb hit something, and the thing beeped, and he squawked.

“Please tell me you aren’t getting attacked again.” Nightwing’s voice disturbed him. He was not turbed. He wasn’t crash, he- “Bart, are you listening to me?”

“What?” He groaned, half muffled by his pillow. “Was sleeping…”

“Bart, it’s three in the afternoon. How the hell did you sleep that long?”

More awake than he wanted to be, Kid Flash frowned at the phone. He was reminded of why he’d set that tone to be Nightwing’s ringtone in the first place. Nasty, sleep disturbing, horrible bat person that he was. “I went running, so what?”

“Running doesn’t tire you out. We have an open investigation to find the things that _do_ tire you out, and so far we’ve found a grand total of two activities.”

“I went running all of last night, and most of this morning.” He retorted.

“What?”

“Rarotonga. Nice place. So’s Australia, and its empty enough for me to really build up some speed there.”

“Australia and… Rarotonga, which I’ve never heard of.”

“I ran round there ‘til a few hours after it got dark.”

“By which time it would have been god knows what in the morning here.” Nightwing sighed. “I’ll send up a notation to the Watchtower. If anyone recorded weird data in the Australian outback, they can disregard it, because it certainly wasn’t a kangaroo going over the national speed limit.”

“Oh, I went much faster than that.” He yawned, and rolled to his feet, ruffling through his clothes. “I assume you need me for something?”

“Team meeting. Kaldur asked me to my sure you knew.”

“Which is, of course, our secret code for having a short debrief then pizza and video games, right?”

“Well no one would turn up otherwise.” His alarm clock for the day huffed, amused. “We start at five. I just thought I’d check in because no one’s seen you all day.”

“You are a terrible person for disturbing my sleep and I hate you.”

“Five o’clock, Bart. You don’t have any excuses for being late.” The line disconnected before he could retort that that was Wally, not him. Although he might have missed a couple meetings. Just a few.

Well, if they didn’t give him food, there was no reason to turn up, was there?

It took him a couple seconds to get dressed, and half an hour to take a shower, because there was no reason to do it at superspeed and having the water you were in go all blobby and strange while you stood under it was unpleasant. Like bathing in clear thick mud. Then he realised that getting dressed _before_ a shower rather than _after_ it was stupid, and berated himself as he flung on his clothes again and zipped downstairs.

Joan caught him by the shoulder with the ease of very long practise. “All recharged?” She asked kindly, looking up at him. He smiled back down at his guardian, and tried not to be bothered by her ever whitening hair. She really shouldn’t have been doing chores, but there was no stopping her. She did it sneakily. A spy chore master, who made sure all his socks were folded.

Both Joan and Jay Garrick were getting on in years. Like, really getting on. Jay had been ninety seven when Bart had arrived back into the past and Joan ninety three. Now, they were one hundred and two and ninety seven respectively, and despite the fact that they might be the healthiest people on the planet lifestyle-wise, and they were surrounded by people giving them access to the best medical care on the planet, it was starting to show.

The garden out back that had been so neat and prim when he’d arrived was barely touched now, weeds taking over the hidden nooks and corners. The washing line had been lowered, a year ago, so that Joan could reach it without stretching. Jay didn’t race with him and Barry anymore; he barely ran at all. Both of them stuck around home lots, didn’t leave their little circle of influence. And it was breaking Bart’s heart.

In his own time, he hadn’t known anyone over perhaps seventy at the most. People just didn’t last that long. It hadn’t been sad, it had just been a fact of life, a shorter life expectancy that almost wasn’t worth noting, because he was young, he was new and strong to the world, so it wasn’t anything _he_ had to worry about. Then suddenly he’d come back, come back and instead of being placed with his grandfather or Wally, Jay and Joan had taken him in.

And he’d come to care for them. He never called them his parents, not even in his head, but they were family, in all the ways that mattered. So suddenly two people that he cared about were old and only growing older. They were gracious and accepting about it, but to him? It had been like they were withering, slowly, like a plant staved of water, but there wasn’t any magic liquid to give them. No cure for a life that had been long lived.

Now, he’d given in to the inevitability of it, for the most part. Bart wished he’d got to spend more time with them, a greater portion of their lives and his, but it wasn’t hopeless. They were healthy, and definitely happy, and if they, as they’d reassured him time and time again, weren’t worried about it, he shouldn’t be either. But he was a time traveller. The inevitability of time didn’t sit well with him.

He didn’t voice his concerns to anyone else. But, just as he saw Barry and Iris and every other friend that the Garricks had taken into their lives leave their cutlery just a little closer to their plates, pull out their chairs for them so that they could sit down, and offer to drive them to the store down the road, he too stuck a little closer, did a little more for them. It was the main reason he hadn’t considered renting an apartment, yet. He had the money for it (science papers paid surprisingly well, even if actually writing things down was annoying and slow and he was useless at it), but Bart was better here, with them while he still could be, reaching the high shelves and cleaning the gutters in the roof and making himself useful while Joan teased that the English classes she’d made him take were worth it after all. Which, of course, was completely wrong. Scientific essays were NOTHING like the crap he’d had to learn for schoolwork.

He realised he’d been quiet for too long, almost two entire seconds. “Hm? Fine.”

“You look distracted, sweetie.”

“I’m trying to think of an argument to get Nightwing to upgrade the gaming stuff at base.” Bart covered up smoothly. “New stuff’s coming out, but we don’t have the equipment to play it.” While saying so, he deftly stole her basket of washing.

“Oi!” She swatted at him. “Give that back, young man.”

He poked out his tongue cheekily. “You’ll have to catch me first.”

Joan laughed, and came forward as Bart retreated, dancing down the hallway and into the sunlight outside. “Well, your plan has its flaws.”

“It does?”

“Yes. Mainly that, while you have the washing,” she gestured to a pouch hanging by her side, “I have the pegs.”

“Your superior strategy has won me over,” he said with a grin and a bow. “Thus I will share this epic quest of laundry with you, fair maiden!”

The giggle from Joan made it all worth it.

At the almost-correct time, Bart turned up for the meeting, and, as usual, found he was the last person to arrive. Everyone from Aqualad to Wolf was there, standing, sitting, or lounging on one of the worn couches in the room, and Kaldur graced him with a disapproving look before they started. “I do not understand how someone with superspeed is always the last to arrive.”

“Have you ever played with a baby giraffe?”

Nonplussed, Aqualad blinked. “No. That makes no sense.”

“Course it makes sense! That was what I was doing.” He shrugged. “I got distracted.”

“At least you’re only five minutes late.” Mel put in teasing. “Better than that time you showed up the next day, confused about why we weren’t all in there with you.”

“That time really wasn’t my fault.” He tried to defend himself futilely.

“No? What about the time with the piñatas?”

“Well-“

“Enough. Settle down, we’ve got to start.” Kaldur took the centre stage, and Bart found a place next to Cassie to look up at him. “We think we may have found something.

“Yesterday, as some of you know, we got a call in from Kid Flash. He, in turn, had been called in by a friend in Mexico City. We dispatched a squad to help out, but when we arrived, Batgirl and Nightwing were separated from the group while making their way to the fight. They encountered armed gunmen. I will elaborate on that later.

“Wonder Girl and Beast Boy joined Kid Flash and his friend Bunker, but were not able to subdue the villain. More backup was called in, and Blue Beetle and Miss Martian helped evacuate our squad to a position further back. Batgirl had guessed that the gunmen were from a gang trying to defend their turf from the villain, and that turned out to be correct. They spilt up to take down both groups, and collected the gunmen to be handed off to the local police while we took custody of the villain.”

Aqualad pressed a finger down on a glowing keyboard, bringing up an image of Atomic Skull into the air before continuing. “The villain in question was Atomic Skull. While he is now in Belle Rave with a collar around his neck, his appearance in Mexico City is… worrying. It’s very far out from where we normally encounter him, and furthermore, he didn’t steal anything while he was there. He didn’t go after anyone in particular. He just destroyed anything he could get his hands on, and, so long as the squad wasn’t right in front of him, he didn’t go after them.

“This is, as you all know, very unusual, because giving up the opportunity to gain bragging right back taking down a hero is not something our enemies traditionally do. In light of this incident,” he pressed anther button, and the screen changed, to a long list of reports, “Red Robin has gone through the past month’s call outs. Twenty per cent of them, or thereabouts, have been supercriminals operating in different states, countries, or even hemispheres than where we would normally find them, doing nothing other than heedless destruction. None of them have needed more than two of you or the League to clean them up, so they haven’t come to our attention.” Kaldur was frowning slightly when he turned back. “We aren’t sure who’s causing this, and we have no idea why, because not very many of these places are what you’d call typical targets, but this _is_ a pattern, it _has_ escalated within the past two weeks. Therefore, we have to find out the aim, and the why of it.”

Red Robin stepped forward, and Tim had come such a long way from that quiet, unsure boy who stepped around the edges of gatherings. When he spoke it was still soft, but confident, sure of himself. “Me, Nightwing, and Aqualad are all going to be focused on working out who is behind this. The rest of you will also be involved, but this investigation won’t take up every spare minute of your time. We understand that you have your own lives, even if we don’t.” That drew a laugh from his teammates.

Aqualad  took the floor back.“Tomorrow, we are going on missions, all of us. No sleeping in. Miss Martian, Bumble Bee, Guardian, and Wonder Girl, you’re off to a suspected training camp for the League of Shadows. The bioship is at your disposal. Myself and Lagoon Boy are off to Atlantis on a diplomatic mission to find out if they have been having increasing trouble in line with ours. Superboy, Kid Flash, Wolf, and Blue Beetle, you are going to a factory of a sub-set of Lexcorp. Red Robin, Batgirl, and Beast Boy are on a mission to plant listening devices in a couple of likely gathering points for Supervillains, and they have the use of the Supercycle. Nightwing is going to be using his contacts in the police force to investigate their own recent experiences with supercriminals.”

“Are you all clear on what you should be doing?” Looking at the nods around the room, Nightwing stepped forward and flicked his hand, shutting off the display. “Then you can go.”

A few people, Miss Martian, Nightwing and Red Robin, Bumble Bee and Rocket (when had she snuck in?), did leave, but most everyone else stayed behind. The weekly gathering was valuable time; time not spent running for their lives or leaping in to save the day. You always became close to your teammates, especially if they regularly saved your life, but this, this free time without danger was what had brought them together beyond that, what made them friends and then family to one another.

Cassie and La’gaan jumped over to the gaming rig, the familiar argument about what to play starting up as a sort of almost-soothing, sort-of-irritating background music. Jaime flopped down on the couch, and his armour vanished, while beside him Beast Boy cured up as a green golden retriever, tucking his tail over his nose. On another couch, Batgirl shoved Superboy over to make room, and the clone let himself be moved, almost as if he didn’t have the super strength to withstand bullets.

Aqualad tugged at his shoulder. “Will you come help me with the food, Bart?”

“Sure Kaldur.” He got up, and trailed the Atlantian into the kitchen.

Pizzas, probably twenty of them, took up his load, as Kaldur took all the various side dishes people had ordered. He zipped out and put them on the central table, before dodging back in to the get the drinks and plates and stuff. Looking at all the raw food in a pile, it seemed like way to much overkill, but when you factored in a speedster, several people with super strength, and Beast Boy, who deserved a classification all of his own, it was barely enough to keep everyone happy.

Predictably, as soon as the pizza was in the room, gaming arguments and comfortable seating was forgotten in the lurch to grab food. Quickly, he nipped in under Batgirl’s outstretched arm and stole five boxes and a bottle of water before retreating to a defensive position. Maybe he was being unfair to Beast Boy. Garfield had, after all, only got one box to himself, whereas Bart had taken a quarter of the total food available.

An hour later, and the squabbles around remotes had started to die down, everyone beginning to get content and sleepily as the latest game lit up the screen and threw shadows across the greasy pizza boxes. Bart wasn’t tired, eating could never be _tiring_ , but with food in his belly and doodling faces across one of his pizza boxes, watching as the pen sometimes sank into the cardboard when he pressed too hard, he was content.

He shifted, and stretched, throwing his legs out over Jaime’s lap. When Jaime shoved them off, he huffed and grumbled, because he’d shared his pizza with the unarmoured Beetle. Really. He’d SHARED his PIZZA. The least Jaime could do was cope with having Bart’s feet on his lap.

La’gaan and Guardian were the ones currently in possession of the remotes, firing furiously at each other and exchanging hushed insults. Behind them Beast Boy has switched couches and his dog form had grown, to something much bigger and fur covered, blanketing Superboy and most of Batgirl. The red haired heroine had her head thrown back, and either she was counting ceiling tiles or she was asleep, cape hanging lopsided off the back of the couch.

When that game went to La’gaan, he was asked to play, but Bart whispered an excuse. He either always lost when he didn’t use superspeed, or always won when he did use his powers, so while following the changing tides of fortune his friends had playing the game was fun, taking apart the console to fiddle with held more appeal than actually picking up a remote for himself. With one more aborted attempt to stick his legs across Jaime’s lap, things started to dissolve as Blue got up and started to clean away the crap that had been left, everyone else joining in with varying levels of enthusiasm. The night ended with him Zetaing back home, comfortable and content and with pockets filled with the candy he’d won off Cassie betting on La’gaan for the final match.

The next morning everyone assembled, those who had been there the previous night expounding about it to those who hadn’t. La’gaan was particularly insufferable, bragging and smug, but thankfully he and Aqualad were spirited off into the depths of the ocean soon enough, leaving Guardian to tell a slightly different story to all those who remained.

Red Robin stood off to the side scrolling through data, before he discreetly broke off and gestured to Batgirl and Beast Boy, pulling them away for their mission. With three more people out of the audience, it broke down as they flocked together into their groups for the day, Superboy and Blue Beetle coming over to stand near him, while Wolf got to his feet and Bart flipped down his goggles.

“What’s the plan, ese?” Jaime’s face was free, but the rest of the armour was active.

“We need to see the place we’ll be sneaking into first.” Superboy grunted.

“It’s not that close to the Zeta tube.” Bart noted, looking at the information on one of the room’s active screens. “Will Wolf be able to keep up with us all?”

“Hey.” Superboy scowled. “Wolf is-“

“Running with someone who can break the sound barrier without much effort, someone with a jetpack, and someone with a super-jumpyish thing.” Bart pointed out.

“Okay, so he might not be as fast as us. He can track us, follow us, right boy?”

Wolf huffed his agreement, batting his tail against his master’s side.

“Okay then, that’s settled.” The armour closed over Jaime’s face. “Can we go then? I’ve got studying to do.”

With a quick round of nods, including one from the dog, Bart stepped forward and programmed their destination into the Zeta tube, moving past the computer’s announcement and into dissolving, disorientating light. He was spat out from the tube into a nicely deserted underground parking lot, with a sign that told him that it was closed for repairs. Blue, Superboy, and Wolf all came soon after, the tube not big enough to make room for more than one person at once. When the canine came through, the computer beeped to itself in what Bart thought was a happy fashion and shutdown, so that it was just a sheltered alcove in the corner of an empty concrete room, nothing more.

“Okay.” Superboy took charge. “The factory we’re going after is pretty hidden. Either they’re making something we don’t want there or they’ve got people there they don’t want us to know about, but the paperwork on this was very sketchy. There’s something that’s being hidden.”

“Fine, but we’re underground, right?” Jaime’s eyes were unfocused. “Why am I reading so much humidity here?”

Superboy shrugged. “It’s India. Pretty typical for this part of the world.”

Bart liked the heat, even if it was muggy, but that wasn’t exactly relevant to the mission at hand. “Blue, you’ll lead the way?”

“What, afraid you can’t keep up?” It was a pretty pathetic insult, but the teasing was good, normal and comforting.

“Need I remind you that the last time I went running without any idea where I was going…”

“You ended up in Africa. On a mountain. In the snow. In _Africa._ Yeah, I remember.” Blue snapped out his wings. “Maybe we _should_ try to avoid that this time then.”

“Shut up and fly.” Superboy rolled his eyes.

Kid Flash grinned, and Blue grinned back, because if that wasn’t an invitation for more banter then-

“No. We’re going. Now.”

Superboy had this irritating habit of ruining Kid Flash’s fun, he mused, following Blue up the series of ramps leading to ground level. They were ridiculously far below the surface, and it took another five minutes for Superboy to join them looking out at a busy street, his super jumping being completely useless unless he wanted to destroy the roof on his way out. Blue leapt up into the air again, and then they were off, Bart running easily along underneath him, Superboy jumping and dodging him in mid-flight, and Wolf far behind them in just a few seconds, tracking Bart’s trail.

When their destination came into view, they stopped and collected themselves on the hillside above the factory which they’d been sent to look into. Bart flopped down on a rock, and Blue and Superboy did their scanning thing, supervision and god-knows-what the armour was doing cracking open the outer walls far better than his goggles could do at that distance.

“If it’s a hideout, it’s a good cover.” Superboy said absently. “All I see is people in a production line.”

“Si, me too. Too far to make out any details, so I can’t match any faces to a database, but I don’t think we’re exactly looking at a hiding spot for wanted criminals here.” Jaime agreed. “It does look like they’re making parts in there, though. Could be for something we don’t want on the market.”

“Most likely, yeah.”

They all fell silent, a companionable, easy silence as time rolled past with endless (or, as everyone frequently told him, not endless at all) patience, waiting for Wolf to turn up. Really Bart wasn’t sure why they’d brought him along, together Superboy, him and Blue Beetle would have been much more efficient and, yes, _faster_ , without the canine, but he wasn’t going to suggest that in front of or within Superboy’s hearing range.

It felt like an hour before the dog turned up, out of breath and panting and tired in a way that meant he would be absolutely useless in a fight and which make Bart want to roll his eyes disparagingly. Conscious of the audience in hand, he stopped himself, and waited yet more as Superboy fussed over Wolf.

Finally, (that was to say, three seconds later), he’d had enough. “LookcanIgoahead? I’m no use sitting here.”

“Wolf’s only just got here.” Superboy said, threading his hands through his pet’s fur. “Give him some time to recover.”

“I’m not talking about an all-out assault. Just let me go in, scout the place out, run through a couple of walls!”

“He is kinda going nuts just being stuck here, ese.” Blue pointed out, and Kid Flash shot him a grateful look.

“Fine. Kid Flash can go in and, I dunno, try taking a closer look, and if that shuts you two up, I’ll be happy. But no contact. And if you see anyone with superpowers, don’t engage. And-“

Any other instructions were lost in the wind as an antsy speedster got to stretch his legs and run. Really, he’d been _remarkably_ patient. _Really._ He’d sat still (sort of) and quiet (for the most part) for an entire HOUR without anything to do, and now that the dog was here they wanted him to sit still some more? No way. He was being hard on Wolf; he usually didn’t have anything against his furry teammate, but really. An HOUR. Sitting STILL.

Simply put, he couldn’t do it anymore.

The perimeter fence was just that; a fence, wire and chain link, and probably not enough to stop a determined child, let alone someone who could breeze through walls like they weren’t there. Some of Lex’s buildings had nasty surprises in them, usually of the ‘oh shit, security can actually see me’ variety, but there was nothing more complex then barbed wire at this factory. Which made the chances of seeing anything interesting inside even lower. Pity.

He blurred though the side of the concrete block wall, and he was in a room, full of workers. One man stood above them, gun in hand, but at this speed there was no way that the guard would see him. Just workers.

He needed to slow down to get a good look at what the workers were making, though, so Kid Flash darted up and kicked the gunman in the head, confiscating his weapon and disassembling it so that no one else employed there could grab it and start the game of shooting at Kid Flash or at anyone else.

Then the speedster stood back, and flicked across to a worker, grabbed the part that was being worked on and held the-

Held the boy against the wall.

The boy, the dirty, unwashed boy, the thin wasted scum smeared child who start jabbering rapidly in a language he didn’t speak, apologetic, pleading, crying, couldn’t be more then twelve years old, but so thin, bones stark and weak, without an inch of fat and he was crying, the boy, he was crying and Bart was wheeling, wheeling away because he knew this, because this language was universal, pain and suffering and the hopelessness of the weak and the chained.

Slowly, very, very slowly, Bart turned his head. Because this did not happen. He had _fought_ to stop this from happening. So this did not happen.

But, on the floor, matted rugs and stinking cloths. Food bowls licked clean. At least, he thought distantly, they weren’t wearing collars.

He was still holding the boy. He dropped him.

Carefully, with precise, slow movements, he reached up to his ear, and clicked on the communicator.

“Blue Beetle?”

“Yes? Kid Flash, you found anything?”

“There are children here. Get them out.”

“Children?!” Shock in the voice over the other end of the line. “Bart, what’s wrong? Why’re you talking like that?! What’s happened to your voice?!”

There was nothing wrong with his voice. It was calm. Clear. Just like him. Calm. Clear. Level headed. “The people who own this factory appear to have enslaved children for labour. You and Superboy will get them out. We have to fix this.”

He might have been going a little fast at the end there. “Kid Flash, what, I didn’t hear that, please repeat?”

Fuck it. “SLAVES, BLUE. THEY HAVE SLAVES. They have fucking locked these kids up in a windowless room and children sleeping onthefloor and gunman watching over themIshouldhavekilledhim and chains and, and, and,” he spun, taking in the room, the squalor, “there must be a hundred children here!”

They must have started moving while he was talking. A thudding, heavy crack sounded from the door, and a higher pitched whine echoed as a glowing line appeared in it, cutting the barrier in half. Blue Beetle streamed in through the doorway, and maybe Superboy was behind him, maybe he wasn’t, but Kid Flash didn’t care. He ran, he darted through the crowd of screaming crying panicked children, he ran to hide behind his friend and be cowardly and scared, just for a moment.

“Kid Flash!” Blue grabbed on to him, took one of his hands. “Kid Flash, why are they here, who would do this?! Who the HELL did this?”

“Get them out!” Superboy was there, yelling, yelling even though there were no enemies to yell at, no one to rage against. “Blue Beetle, get them out! Kid Flash, get your arse in gear, find a key, find a saw, find something and _get them out_!”

All around them, the children were screaming, huddling back from the strangers, crying, some of them hysterical. “T-they don’t know we’re the good guys,” Jaime stuttered. “I-I need to talk to them, Kid Flash, _go,_ try help them, just GO!”

He was shoved away, back toward crying and screaming and chains and pain, and when he turned back Blue was gone, gone to help and he should be helping, Bart should have been helping, this was more important than him, he needed to get over himself, he had to help. He ran, out through the back of the factory, and started searching. There had to be offices somewhere here, there had to be a manager, someone in change, a man with keys, and he had to find him.

He found what he was looking for in the ramshackle, half brick, half wooden building on the end. Inside, there was a fan, and an air conditioner, and offices, all in a row. “Hello?”

Somebody shouted something back in another language. A fat, balding, middle aged man lumbered out, and when he saw what Bart was wearing, stuck a sweaty, meaty finger in his face, yelling something incomprehensible. He didn’t have time for this. He really didn’t have time for this, not if he wanted those children out, wanted them out _now_. Kid Flash phased through the wall and dashed back out again, keys in his grip, back to the main factory.

The screaming had gotten worse, as Blue Beetle frantically shouted in whatever language the kids were speaking, and Superboy leapt from one child to the next, breaking chains in his hands with gritted teeth and a growl in his throat.

“Igotkeys,” he stammered stopping abruptly near Blue.

“Unlock the cuffs then!” It was a snappish retort, stressed and quick.

He ducked back. Jaime didn’t mean to upset him. Jaime was just stressed, just stressed because those children were here and he was the only one who could talk to them and it was selfish of Bart to want to run and hide and ask for comfort, it was selfish, it was wrong, he was here to help people, it was selfish, he needed to snap out of it, he had to do something, help them, forget what he wanted, he had to help them.

First it was the wrong key, then it was the wrong one again, but he found the right one, he found it and cuff after cuffs broke off, chain after chain he took off small malnourished wrists and they were so thin, had he been so thin but he couldn’t think about that right now. No. Job to do. Help the kids. Release them, and take off the heavy metal, and move on. Again, and again, a pattern that he was doing far faster than Blue or Superboy, of course he was faster, that was what he was good at, fast, doing things quickly, but god, he didn’t want to be doing this, touching the cold dirty hands, the chains the handcuffs the sleeping areas stacked with filth the collars-

No collars. Kid Flash refocused, and started in on the next little boy.

He didn’t look into their faces. He did not want to meet their eyes. It was an hour, all working together, until every human in the place was freed, herded into a crowd by the mere presence of Wolf, crying and frightened but free.

He watched over them as the police showed up. He did not move. He did not chatter. Someone must have called in their discovery, gotten the voices back at base to send people in, to take action. He waited, and answered the police’s questions when one of the adults packing away children into vans could speak English. He helped, quietly, Blue Beetle and Wolf and Superboy to determine that yes; the only thing that the Lexcorp factory had been hiding was the source of its labour.

He ran, slowly, under Blue Beetle as Wolf bounded by his side, Superboy there and then gone again with his jumps. He identified himself, cleanly, to the computer, after the others went through and it took him away in white light and spinning sound. He stood, quietly, and gave his answers succinctly when Aqualad asked during the debrief. He listened, patiently, to what the others had done, and he commented on the good and the bad. He waited, unobtrusively, through the talking afterwards, and answered the questions that his teammates had. He agreed, softly, that what had happened with his mission was the most interesting story to come of the day.

Then Bumble Bee complimented him, talking about how he’d saved so many people and done so much good.

Bart Allen threw up on the floor.


	5. Part 4

“No!”

“For theeightbillionthtime, _Dick_ , yes. Wait, I mean no. You know what I mean.”

“We need you here! You can’t just-“ Nightwing stuttered to a halt in the middle of his sentence, foot half raised to continue pacing. “You called me Dick.”

“Partially because it’syourname.” Bart glared back, resolute. “Mostly because you’re being one, oh _glorious_ all powerful one.”

“You- never mind. Bart, you can’t just go waltzing off to do your own thing! We need you here! Now!”

“To fucking bad.” Like this, standing close with his arms across his chest, head bared and aggressive, they were the same height, even if Nightwing had more muscle on him. “You won’t mode me on this, dude. This Team is voluntary. So I’m calling in my right to volunteer, or to NOT volunteer. Say what you like. I’m withdrawing from missions until further notice, until my head’s back on straight.”

“Bart, we have a situation to think about! We have a pattern, someone pulling strings behind the curtains, and you want to back out _now_?!”

The speedster let the silence speak for itself, staring back at him.

Nightwing sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose in an oft-repeated habit of stress. “Look… Look, I know yesterday was… rough.”

“Oh, so you were there too, were you?” He countered, cold.

“It was rough.” The black tactician said again. “And god knows, the reports we got from there… it wasn’t right, what you found. It wasn’t right, but don’t you see?! Helping with this investigation, finding out who put those kids there, holding Lex Luthor accountable, it will make a difference! Don’t you want that? Don’t you want to take action?”

Oh, that was so far from understanding the point of all this. “I’m not afraid of taking action, Nightwing.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No!” He snapped, voice thick with exasperation, anger. “I’m afraid that I won’t be able to stop! Do you have any idea, anyatall, of how much shit an out of control speedster could do? How would you stop me, how would you get me to listen to reason?! By the time you started speaking I could be over the horizon and gone.”

“But-“

“No.”

“Kid Flash, we _need_ you.” His tone was earnest, his eyes serious, but when were they not. “We need everyone at the moment, all hands on deck.”

“The answer’s still nope.”

“You’re important! Useful! Having a speedster on the team makes a difference, you can get into places we can’t, run through walls, cover countries when searching for something!”

“Then call in the Flash,” he shrugged.

“Why are you doing this? What, so you see a bunch of kids, and that’s the thing that stopped you, that-“

“Not. Crash.” Bart scowled, and Nightwing thankfully shut up. Then again, it was hard to miss the line he’d just crossed, from sympathetic to insulting. “Look, you need someone who’s got superspeed? Call in my grandfather. I’m not going back into combat for at least the next two weeks, and you’re not changing my mind on this. Got it?”

He could practically see the struggle between more arguing and giving up going on in Nightwing’s eyes. “Bart… We need everyone right now. We really do.”

“And I get that,” he sighed, “but you can’t _force_ me to fight for you, Nightwing. I’m sorry, I really am, but the answer is _no_.”

“At least… at least…”

“I know you’re worried.” He tried to sound consoling, got stuck somewhere beside condescending, and managed to turn it to contrite before Nightwing could take notice. “I know that you think that this is the Light, doing something, making their latest move in whatever twisted game they’re playing, but I can’t. I need some time away from the front lines, for personal reasons, and even if you can’t understand that you should respect it.”

With Bart on the moral high ground, he was feeling pretty great, at least until he saw Kaldur, freshly changed into civilian clothes, come out of the hallways and into the room. “Thank you, Nightwing. I will take it from here.” The Atlantian said pointedly, with the air of someone defusing a bomb.

With a huff, Nightwing stalked out.

Kaldur watched him go, before turning to look down at Bart, face expressionless in a way that was distinctly amused. “Did Nightwing not give you that same speech after the incident with the phinos and the seven jeeps?”

“I’m quoting him word for word.” He admitted easily.

“Am I to take that as proof you are not serious with this?”

“No.” He said firmly, and this was better, he didn’t feel like a disobedient child explaining things to Kaldur, it was a soldier reporting in to his commander. Altogether more formal in every conceivable way, but on this occasion useful. “I’m not going to be going back out there for a while, and I’m not changing my mind on this stance.”

“Alright, but maybe you could avoid baiting Nightwing.” Kaldur requested, lips twisting up in a wry smile. “He has had an exceptionally trying day, as have I. As well as the unforeseen circumstances in your squad’s mission a day ago, there have been three separate full League call outs for us to monitor, and a scare in which we had Nathaniel Tryon undertake a test to see whether his metagene might have reactivated during the four years we have not monitored him.”

Nathaniel. Neutron. “Wasitwhathappened?”

“Slow your speech down. I cannot understand you.”

“What happened?” he said carefully.

“Blue Beetle’s scarab identified what it thought to be Reach technology embedded in Nathaniel’s body, and alerted everyone who was on base at the time. However, the alarm was cancelled when a second scan from the scarab showed it was not of Reach making. Jaime says that he wouldn’t trust that there is anything in Nathaniel’s system at all. Nothing has shown up on any other scans, and he walked through a metal detector on the way out without any difficulty.”

“Oh… crash.”

“Yes. Because of this, I would beg of you, Bart, not to try to incite Nightwing like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

“Bulls, flags, you’ve really picked up a lot of the weird clichés us landlubbers have, huh?”

“Yes.” Was stated blandly, but Bart suddenly realised that Kaldur had endured the same day as Nightwing, and wasn’t immune to being annoyed. “Now, if the matter is solved?”

“Yeah, I’ll take a couple of weeks off, be back sometime soon, it’ll be crash.”

“Bart. If you could drop the joke…?”

“Repeating my name isn’t going to change my mind.” He settled his own face into a blank mask, even though it felt wrong and weird for him people only ever took him seriously if he wasn’t smiling. “This isn’t a joke, dude. _Most_ of what I said to Nightwing, even if it wasregurgitatedcrap, wasn’t meant to wind him up. I’m actually serious about this; I’m not going on missions for atleastaweek, possibly two.”

The slight lilt of both eyebrows was the only sign what he’d said had been listened to. “We need you now, Bart. Not two weeks into the future, not a week from today, now. There are signs everything that the Light or another organization is planning something, I do not know what, but their plans have never boded well for us, and the situation is increasingly serious.”

“No.”

“I understand that your trip to India yesterday was distressing.” Now Aqualad’s tone changed, becoming gentle, compromising. “Maybe you are right. Maybe you need a day to yourself to get over it. I can give you that.”

“No. You don’t give me anything, Kaldur. You might be in charge of me, but we are really fucking far from being the military, and this is volunteer work. So this is me, saying that I am NOT going to be volunteering to go back into battle.” He might have been imitating Kaldur’s over the top speech patterns, and it might have been insulting, but if there was ever one thing he was good at, unconsciously insulting annoying and irking people had to be high on the list.

Yup. Just there, in the corner of his eye, a wrinkle of skin just degrees away from becoming a glare. “You are serious in your refusal?”

“Yup.”

And another slight twitch at his informal answer. “Your object is only to combat, yes?”

“Well, I’ll still happily do the grocery shopping for you, if that’s what you mean.”

“No.” And that look was considering, assessing and dangerous. “No, I believe I have something else which you might be able to do. If I remember correctly, there was an occasion, Wally’s birthday, when he was needed for a mission completely unrelated to combat.”

Five hours later, after escaping back to Central City and helping Jay with the rubbish bins and dinner, Bart was still slightly confused as to why being a delivery boy was supposed to be punishment for ignoring orders and creating a problem for both Nightwing and Aqualad, but he was sure he’d find out soon enough. Running out of Central City and into another pocket of human expansion, there was an apartment on the third floor of a reasonably well looked after building, far from the university in that town but in a good neighbourhood that had security issues. Said security issue was pissed off at passive aggressive Atlantians who didn’t explain anything, and fleeing to a safe place where he could feed and nap and generally complain about his new, only hours old task that Aqualad had set him sounded like a fantastic idea.

 “Jaaaaaime!” The rusty haired speedster whined, throwing himself down on the sofa.

Jaime didn’t even look up from his textbook, thumbing along a crease in the page. “Dude, you have got to stop breaking into my apartment.”

“I resent that implication! I didn’t break anything.”

“I think ‘phasing through the wall’ still counts as breaking and entering, ese.”

“You’re the lawyer, you tell me.”

“Not one yet.”

“Are too.”

“Are not.”

“Are too.”

“Most definitely not.”

“Are not, wait no, are too.”

“I’m not.”

“…What were we talking about?”

His friend closed the textbook with a quiet booky thump, and looked over at him, smirking. “You have the concentration of a hummingbird.”

“Last time you said it was a goldfish.” Bart pointed out, hanging upside down from his sprawl on the couch.

“Memory of a goldfish. Concentration of a hummingbird.”

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!”

“No.” He had a finger waggled at him. “No, bad.”

“You never let me do aaaaaanything.”

“And, we’re back to the whining.”

“You think I’m whining? _This_ is not _whining_. This is _complaining_. Do you want to hear whining? THIIIS IS WHIIIIIIIINING.”

“…I have a feeling that there was an obscure reference in there somewhere.”

“Ten points if you know it!”

“I’m not even going to try.” At Bart’s ridiculous pout, Jaime snorted. “Stop that. Why’re you here anyway? Apart from your ever present desire to invade my home, of course.”

“Well, her-man-o, I can go if you’ve got to study for a test or something.” Bart tried and failed to shrug from his odd position. “The big bad’s angry at me. Thought I’d come here and steal your food until he figures out where I am and what Kaldur devised for me and finds something really unpleasant for me to do.”

“The big bad? What, Lex Luthor?” The armour rippled, almost but not quite coming out to encase his skin.

“Nope.”

“…Flash?”

“Is neither big nor bad.”

“…Batman?”

“Okay, good point, he’s the biggest big bad. The second biggest big bad’s after me, then.”

“Thank you,” Jaime said dryly, “for clearing that up.”

“You and your strange sarcasm and your scraggily beard have nothing on me!”

“Hey, don’t mock my poor chin.” He countered, absently rubbing a hand over his ever present stubbly growth. “Are you even old enough to grow one?”

Theatrically, Bart shuddered, managing to avoid vibrating through his plushy seat by accident. “No, no nonononono. Beards. Bad. Speedsters don’t like.”

“Really?” And Jaime actually sounded curious. “Why not?”

“Dude, we have enough trouble with insects flying in our faces already! None of us are going to add to that by getting bugs and god knows what else tangled in facial hair!”

“Okay. Fair point, that wouldn’t be pleasant.”

“Not crash at all.” Bart agreed.

“So, why are you here?”

…Damnit. “Since when have you been so good at picking out deflection?”

“And obfuscation. And subject changes. And that thing you do when you tell the truth but make it sound like a joke.”

“That’s really annoying.”

“Hey, hermano, if you’ve got to be so attention grabbing all the time, then I’ll end up learning your tricks. Now what’s up?”

Bart pulled a face. “Nightwing haaaates me,” he whinged, “and Kaldur was glaring at me. And now I’m a postman.”

When no sympathy was forthcoming, he twisted around, turning the right way up to hang himself over the back of the sofa like an article of discarded clothing. Jaime rolled his eyes. “You have the weirdest way of sitting ever. Because it never actually involves sitting.”

“It’s more comfortable!” he protested. “Anyway, Aqualad’s making me into the Team’s pet postman. And PR person. And anything else he can think of. He’s slightly pissed off with me, but he can’t actually order me to do want he wants to, so this is what he’s come up with as punishment.”

“Or,” Jaime suggested, “he might just be trying to get you to be useful.”

“I’m always useful!”

Jaime shot him a pointed look, and turned back to his book.

“Jaime…”

“…”

“Jaiiime.”

He was still very determinedly reading his book, and not talking to Bart.

“Jaiiiiiiime!”

When the next plaintive plead didn’t work, Bart got up and darted over to sit on the table in front of him, one of his legs crossed over the book Jaime was trying to read. “Bart!”

“Jaime!” He chirped, pleased.

“I have to eat off this! Geroff!” He got shoved off the table.

“You don’t like me anymore.” Bart sniffed.

Instead of the usual banter that statement was meant to prompt, he got rolled eyes and a chair at the other end of the table nudged out for him to sit in.  “You only like me for my food.” The retort was quieter than usual and almost distracted, probably because translating legalese was harder than speaking Reach with his mouth full.

“It is probably cupboard love, yeah.” Bart agreed.

“Come on.” The book was set aside and Jaime wandered past him into the kitchen. “Set up the tv, I’ll get the food. Not like I was getting much study done anyway.”

“Crash! Although your apartment is freaky clean.”

“Compared to the base after a Team meeting, a toilet could easily be considered clean.”

“Did you know that toilets have one of the lowest average bacteria counts of any surface in a home? You’ve got more harmful bacteria on your kitchen bench than on your toilet seat.”

Jaime looked down at the surface underneath his fingers. “Thanks for that, Bart. Really, thanks. Now I’m feeling a need to go OCD cleaning.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Please, hermano, don’t.”

They spent the rest of the night throwing popcorn at the screen, Jaime yelling in Spanish which he refused to translate and Bart trying to imitate him, butchering the words horribly. And if Jaime sometimes stopped what he was doing or if the smile sometimes fell off his face, it was fine. He’d been there too. Blue Beetle had talked to those children, and here on the couch next to Jaime was probably one of the few places no one would ask him about it. Even if Jaime seemed particularly jumpy and tense. But if he had to choose between jumpy and tense or prying and sympathetic, the current pensiveness was the better option.

*

 “-And you know that this is time sensitive, well, it’s actually equipment to measure time after the last one was loaned out to a school by mistake and then they lost it, this stuff’s really quite expensive so-“

“If it’s time sensitive, get off the damn phone and let me run!” He snapped, scowling irritably at nothing in particular.

“I’m not the one who volunteered for this, remember?” Red Robin chided, and Bart spared a moment to be sort-of abashed.

It wasn’t Robin’s fault. Someone had wrangled him into this, just like Bart, although he was probably a good deal more willing to do it, playing mission controller while hacking who knows what. But still, this was _boring_. It was drizzling and unpleasant and he was being nothing more than a delivery boy for some bit of electronics that couldn’t have been taken through the Zeta tubes, and Bart was NOT happy that Nightwing had made this sound like his choice, because it WASN’T. The nasty evil acrobat had enthusiastically guilted him into doing this on top of what Kaldur had given him for the day.

“...Sorry, birdy boy.”

“You are grouchy today, aren’t you? Alright, get gone. Red Robin out.”

Relieved, and alsosortofmaybeactually sorry for getting mad, Bart went Mach two a couple seconds later. The thingy-ma-bob in his backpack looked interesting, but according to absolutely EVERYONE, he wasn’t allowed to touch it. On pain of death. And dismemberment. And the wrath of the science team who had created it.  Speaking as a science geek himself, he knew the last one was the one to look out for.

Seriously though, he really wanted to play around with it, take it apart, install something in for parameters around infrared, that sort of thing. It was starting to piss him off how people just discarded him like he wasn’t anything but the transport, a nice, high speed delivery service with a smart mouth. He might have been only seventeen, but he could bet that any of the Robins would have been at least told why they weren’t allowed to interfere before being packed off. No one thought he was the Joker just because he made jokes. Why did they write him off as a child just because he was carefree? Plenty of adults he knew were carefree. Heck, his own grandfather made puns more suited to a five year old than to a married man with kids, and no one disregarded him.

So yes. Annoyed, running at he didn’t know what speed, and carrying a really great, shiny toy that he wanted to covet and hide away and hiss over like a dragon protecting its hoard, Bart had only been doing the not-combat stuff for a week, and it was beginning to drive him mad. Probably less mad then he’d be surrounded by fighting and maybe crying dead-eyed children, but still, he wasn’t happy.

The place which was taking ownership of the new shiny toy wasn’t expecting him to come through the wall, but they managed to recover quickly, one woman coming forward to collect the stuff. Bart tried to act friendly, especially considering it was waaay better than the last place, where people had tried to shoot at him (he could have sworn someone had called him a ghost). “Stuff for you, dude.”

“The equipment?” Everyone in the room wearing a lab coat visibly perked up. “You have it? It was not expected until-“

“Three hours, three days, yeah it’s early, you really complaining?” He slipped off the backpack and put it on a lab bench. “What’s it for, anyway?”

“Measuring the radiation in relation to the space-t-“ The woman stopped, and looked him over. “You probably wouldn’t be interested.”

“Aw, don’t disregard me that easily! What, measuring the radiation as it effects the fabric of space-time in new and interesting ways?” Wrong thing to do if you were looking to time travel, but not everything to do with advanced physics was focused on that.

“Ah, yes…”

“So?”

But the woman just clutched at her new equipment and started checking it over for damage. Bart sighed, but he knew a dismissal when he saw one. He was just the delivery boy, right? No reason to talk to him, or, y-know, thank him or anything, or even really acknowledge he existed beyond what he was carrying. No reason at all.

He had been busy all week, delivering boxes of Radon that were needed after some warehouse ran out in the northern reaches of Canada, replacing a broken bulb in a remote section of Ireland, giving out a new atomic clock to Star Labs in Paris after a theft by Toyman, pretty much doing everything anyone wanted in any corner of the world anyone could think to send him to. Particle accelerator parts, a weird gismo that needed something to calibrate itself, four different radio relay stations that had lost all of their Neodymium glass dyed compounds, he’d done a little bit of pretty much everything. Also, Bart didn’t think Aqualad appreciated just how hard it was to repair relay stations.

Actually, he didn’t think anyone realised just how much work he was doing for them. Sure, he liked to run, but just because he was good at it didn’t mean that it wasn’t tiring in massive overdoses. Making jokes about stained glass didn’t mean that relay stations fixed themselves, doing things quickly by other people’s standards didn’t mean that they went any faster for him. There wasn’t just a lack of respect, or appreciation, or recognition, he hadn’t gotten _any_. At all. And then at the end of the day he ran back to base and the others would ask him, yet again, what he’d done to deserve punishment, and truthfully, he’d answer _nothing_. But then Kaldur or Nightwing would turn up again and he’d snipe at them and them at him, trying to get him back on normal missions, and the whole cycle would start over again the next day.

He thought of himself as being fairly self-aware, all things considered, so he knew the reason that being disregarded rubbed him up the wrong way was more to do with vanity than any selfless motivation. He liked being the centre of attention, he liked being _noticed_ , and doing all the work without any of the reward or the attention grated on him.

So on the eighth day of his new routine, after delivering his latest package to the lab coats who’d wanted it, Bart skipped out on his next assignment, and ran to find possibly the only place no one would ever think to look for him, ever.

Gotham was big, bigger than he’d thought it would be. Running really fast, he didn’t see much of anything, and even the biggest cities passed in seconds, but down on the ground at slower speeds, searching, it all seemed vastly more complex, an unroofed burrow of metal and human construction. Also, everything seemed to be built to match the Batman. Or maybe it was the other way around. Point was, the place seemed to be made of nothing but tall, high building to swing grappling hooks off and shadow filled alleyways from which to loom at unsuspecting passers-by.

Even with the added aid and teenie weenie _slight_ advantage of knowing who Batman actually was, it took him an hour (after removing his communicator from its slot under the lightning bolts on the side of his head and dropping it in the sewers) for Kid Flash to find an entrance to the Batcave. Given that there had to be a hundred ways in and out of the thing, that was pretty damn impressive. He wasn’t even going to _try_ to get through whatever Bruce Wayne had put in to stop intruders, which left him vibrating through what felt like an endless amount of steel door and hoping that it turned back into tunnel at some point or another.

The main thing he’d learned so far was that Batman was a paranoid bastard.

Which wasn’t really learning anything.

More like a feature of the collective knowledge of the human race by now.

Anyway,  _then_ he got lost in the maze of tunnels, which all looked the same, and after that he found himself in what could have possibly been a submarine bay, luckily empty, and it was only after THAT that he managed to find a lift. Which he couldn’t take. Because if he did, the security cameras would go off. Perfect. Bart groaned, and went back to mapping out every square inch of the tunnels, desperately hoping that maybepossiblyhopefully he’d remember enough to find an exit.

Of course he didn’t.  He was just debating with himself as to whether it was possible that the Batman had rigged the tunnels to actually _switch themselves up_ , when the distant sound of car tyres brought him out of his thoughts and back into reality, quickly sending Kid Flash phasing back into a wall. After the passing of what could only have been the (well, a) Batmobile, he finally had a direction. Slightly relieved and more than a little embarrassed, Bart sped off down the path that the car had zoomed up.

Apparently, the black car had been going out, not in, and tracing its route back led him to what, finally, had to be the centre cavern. Tiers of trophy’s, alien tech, home grown tools, cars, motorcycles, anything anyone wearing a bat insignia could want, lining up, lying in crates, polished on pedestals, and displayed on dining tables, which looked to have been repurposed.

“Wow…”

A distant noise, echoing from the upper floors, brought him back on mode. Great. Wasn’t Batman between Robins at the moment? Although, there was Batgirl. Batgirl, who would merrily and happily castrate him for being in the cave. Bart yelped, and phased through a door to hide.

It was a room entirely composed of bataraangs. Which was actually really creepy, when he thought about it, endless rows of blades all just waiting to be used, normal ones and explody ones and tracker ones that all looked the same, every single one of them. He wasn’t touching anything. No matter how crash these toys were, they came with the chance of igniting a fiery reason for Nightwing to leave him on delivery duty for all eternity, and not much was worse than that.

Mmm, cookies.

Mmm, cookies? He left the sharp throwy things alone in favour of doing a quick search, just to check he hadn’t wandered by a kitchen in the armoury. Nope. No kitchen, no cookies. Just bataraangs.  But he could still smell chocolatey goodness in the air, and he definitely hadn’t been smelling that before so… Bart followed the thought to its logical conclusion. Someone had put cookies in the Batcave. Maybe there was an automatic release of cookies whenever Batman left the house?

Ignoring the way that that thought made no sense under any circumstances, Bart poked his head out of the door, vibrating partly to phase through the entrance, and partly just because, well, cookies.

He was not proud of what came next. Because there was a cookie, delicious and sweet, sitting on a car engine to his left, so naturally, he darted over and grabbed it. And it was a good cookie. And so was the next one. And the one after that. By the time Kid Flash realised he was being led along like a misbehaving cat, treats placed at every corner to entice him forwards, he was standing in front of a Very Big Screen that deserved the capital letters, and there was an entire plate of the fresh baked goodness right in front of him. He didn’t so much eat as drink them down, and was just about to start searching for more when he looked up.

The tray where the cookies had just disappeared from was being held. By a guy in a suit. Suits were never good. Neither was the look on the man’s face, oddly disapproving and paternal, but the suit thing was more important.

“Who are you, and how did you get in here?!” He probably would have been more intimidating without crumbs round his mouth.

Wordlessly, the man held out a… napkin.

Bart looked down at it. He looked back up. The man swished the napkin, pointedly, and that was talent, Bart hadn’t thought that napkins could have conveyed impatience. He glanced down at it, and up again, but man-in-suit wasn’t doing anything else.

Quickly, he took a look at the rest of whoever had broken into the Batcave. The guy didn’t have weapons on him, although the pocket watch in his jacket needed winding. He didn’t seem to have powers, either, or not ones that were visible and his suit didn’t fold out into armour. If there was any poison in the cookies, well, it was a little too late for that anyway, and why did the man have cookies when he was invading the Batcave?

“Why do you have cookies if you’re invading the Batcave?”

The napkin was swung at him pointedly again.

“No seriously.”

“Wipe your mouth, young master.”

“Wipe my…? Master…?”

The man held out the napkin for a third time, and this time, _things_ were threated unless Bart didn’t do what he said. He grabbed the bit of cloth and got the crumbs off himself, before realising that he’d just wiped his face with something a potential enemy had handed him, and held it out at the end of his arm, like it was a bag full of dog crap.

“This isn’t going to eat my face is it?”

He got An Eyebrow Look in return, and discovered a second thing in the Batcave that deserved capitalization.

“Isn’t, like, covered in poison is it?”

“I would like to think that the laundry facilities here are more than adequate at removing such things.” The man said, as dry as the desert in drought and somehow familiar.

“Hey!” Why was he talking like that? “Who _are_ you?”

“I rather think that should be my question.” If he didn’t stop with that polite-actually-mocking talk, Bart was going to… actually; he didn’t know what he was going to do. He was pretty much lost really. “Considering that it is my home you are invading.”

“Why would anyone want to live _here_? I mean, it’s cool, but I don’t think that it’s exactly heated, and it must get freezing in winter, and I don’t know about you, but I kinda feel like the joker statue thing in the corner is watching me, and-“

“All the possible things you could take from that sentence,” and now mystery-man was picking up trash, “and that is what you choose?”

“Sorry,” Bart replied automatically. “Didn’t mean to insult your home.”

“I would reply with a repeat of what I just said, but I have a feeling that it would be similarly twisted.” He now had a pile of… were those dishes balanced on a computer console? And was that a feather duster?

“Why’da have a feather duster? And what’s ya name?”

“A butler must have a duster. For dusting. My name, young master, is Alfred.”

“What’s a butler doing in the Batcave? Did you get lost? Do you have more cookies?”

“I have no more cookies.”

“Aw.”

“Also, I am not lost. Hold this, please.” Alfred put the plates, the tray that had held cookies, and the rubbish into Bart’s arms. He tried not to pout. “No pouting.” He failed.

The butler-maybe-ninja turned back to his dusting, and Bart tried to find a place to put the trash. Unfortunately, he had no idea where the kitchen from which the Cookies From Heaven (hey, another capitalization thing, the place was full of them) had come from was, and he had even less desire to go get lost in the tunnels again. On the upside, though, a place like the Batcave must have been crammed with stuff to destroy other stuff! He put the plates down, and made off with the trash.

First he tried a blowtorch from one of the lower levels, which worked well on the crisp packet, but was useless on everything else. Then Kid Flash found a weird gun-ish thing from a box, and tried shooting that. It spurted acid, in a gungy, unpredictable way, and while the acid did something really cool with the remaining food in everything, he was more than a little afraid of touching it, so he put that away. Finally, he unearthed something that looked like a blaster from those sci-fi shows that Beast Boy had marathoned on the base’s TV for an entire week ages back.

The casing was cracked, a little green rock glowing inside that had to be the power source, and the handle was crushed, like an elephant had trodden on it. Bart could speak from personal experience, having seen Beast Boy sit, stand, and wobble on things that were never made to be sat on, stood on, or wobbled on.

Well, so long as he had the shiny thing in hand… it was wrecked; he’d only be doing Batman a favour. The radiation leakage, for starters, was completely unacceptable, even if it would take years to hurt anyone. And the power wastage that came from trying to channel that radiation was stupid too, better to refract that and use it, rather than outright stop it. Also, the wiring had gone a bit faulty, and he was able to fix that, with a little cannibalisation of a few other guns from Batman’s treasure trove. The other guns also gave him a new handle, and he reconfigured the power source to match, making it smaller and much more efficient. The rock that had been in it was enough power, but only just.

It was only after he’d finished that Kid Flash remembered the original mission; namely, to get rid of the trash. He shrugged, used the gun, swore, and went to find a fire extinguisher.

At least the trash was gone.

Bart didn’t know how, but mister ninja-butler managed to not only get to the flames before he did, but find a fire extinguisher from god knows where. Seriously, Bart found a teddy bear, four or five different sorts of oil, and a parachute, but no fire extinguisher.

“How’d you find that?”

“Once again, Master Bartholomew, I will direct you to a better inquiry. A more suitable question might be, what on earth you were doing with that _gun_.”

“Um… cleaning up the rubbish?”

“If one phrases an answer as a question, one can only assume that the answer is, in fact, deficient.” How Alfred stood in the middle of a pile of fire quashing foam and managed to stay clean, Bart didn’t know.

“Hey, why are you cleaning anyway? Why does the Batcave have a ninja butler?”

“I cannot think of a single aspect of my duties that involves ‘ninjaing’.”

“Do you know that when you talk like that, I can practically see the quotation marks?”

“That is good to know. Hand over the blowtorch.”

“What blowtorch?”

“You are holding it behind your back. Give it to me.”

“Fine.”

“And the acid gun.”

“…Fine.”

“And that mess of wires.”

“… _Fine_.”

“And I would appreciate if you would put the foam from the fire extinguisher down too, but I will not touch it.” Another napkin magically appeared. “To wipe your hands with,” came the barely veiled order.

“But I don’t waaaaanna!”

“You are, according to the files we have on you, seventeen, not four. Cease complaining.”

“Wait,” Bart took the napkin from him nonetheless, “you know who I am?”

“You have been playing down here for over ten minutes. It was more than enough time to search through our limited databases of persons with superspeed to find your picture, though I am at somewhat of a loss as to why, exactly, you came in here.”

“I’m hiding.” He admitted, rubbing the back of his head absently and hoping he’d gotten all of the extinguisher foam off his hands before doing so.

“From whom, may I ask?”

“Batman’s sons.”

“Batman’s… sons.”

“Yeah, Red Robin and Nightwing. And Batgirl too, I guess.”

“So you came to the Batcave and let yourself be enticed by a potential enemy with cookies.”

“Yes.”

“Cookies.”

“Cookies. Do you have any more?”

“At least now,” Alfred gave a long suffering sigh, “I am assured that you are indeed related to the Flash.”

“Come on, you gotta have a kitchen!”

“The Batcave does not possess a kitchen.”

“Yeah, but the manor’s got to have one.”

Not a single particle of posture changed, but Bart practically felt the butler becoming wary, fluffing up like a bird defending its chicks. “The Batcave does not possess a manor, either.”

“Now that’s just an outright lie.” Just in case, Bart stepped away from anything he could be impaled upon. “But don’t worry. I won’t tell your boss.”

“The Batman does not order me to do-“

“I’m talking about Bruce Wayne. And his sons, Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, and Jason Todd. Also Barbara Gordon, but she’s less his daughter, and more of his daughter-in-law, if the way she and Nightwing look at each other means anything.

“I’m guessing somewhere above our heads is Wayne Manor, and I couldn’t come in that way because a), its rude, and b) I was originally trying not to get caught and I’m a time travelling speedster from a post-apocalyptic future alternate timeline and I really didn’t know you existed but it makes sense because Bruce would’ve needed someone to raise him and servants never get into history and that way you talk when you’re sarcastic I think Tim copies you and Nightwing a little bit too and we’ve established that I know the big secret.

“Can I have more cookies now?”

As Bart talked, almost-emotions flashed across Alfred’s face, shock, determination to chop Bart into itty-bitty pieces, more shock, dawning resignation, and by the time he asked for more baked goods, simple exasperation. “Your file does not mention your state as a time traveller,” was what he appeared to settle on.

“Classified at the highest level. Which pretty much means they made sure it was never written down in the first place.” He dared to start pocketing wires again while Alfred was (hopefully) distracted. “It’s safer if people don’t know. But hey, my file does put in that I’m Barry Allen’s _grandson_. Am I the only one who thinks that’s a bit of a giveaway?”

“Quite possibly. Return that to the table, if you please.”

“How the hell-“

“Three Robins,” Alfred set him with a piercing gaze, “and the Batman himself.”

“Point taken. Cookies?”

“I would worry that you are slightly obsessed,” he sighed, “but I have met your… grandfather. The last time I walked in with food for him, he did something akin to tackling me, abit in a very friendly manner.”

Crisis apparently averted, Bart zipped over. “If you fed him, you’ll feed me!”

The look he was receiving now wasn’t worthy of capitalization, but was unique in its own way, mainly because Alfred was looking at him like he was a particularly quirky small wide-eyed woodland creature that had wandered into the cave. “If you will follow me young master, I am sure that we can be most accommodating.”


	6. Part 5

 

Nightwing stood in the middle of the room, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose so hard the blood had drained out of the surrounding area, leaving his skin even more pale than usual. The confrontation, if that was what it was, was being discreetly not-looked-at by several members of the Team, mostly the seniors. Red Robin was over in the corner, and was possibly the only one in the room actually not paying attention to them both, eyes locked on a screen and code scrolling by.

It was all pretty par for the course. The Team, and the Justice League by extension, though they wouldn’t admit to it, thrived on gossip and rumour and heresy. The gossip that reported the little conflicts that always came from having so many people all orbiting each other not only provided entertainment, but served a more useful purpose as well. Everyone had to know if someone was holding a grudge against them, if someone was disagreeing with them too badly, talking about them behind their backs. It was a very real issue; the people wandering the base were the people that Bart trusted his life to, and them in return. If personal feelings came in the way, and no matter how much people tried to repress them, they inevitably did, then he wouldn’t want that person watching his back out in the field. And if he heard that two of his other teammates had gotten into a fight? He’d be able to look out for them both, and offer his support in the place of the person who might not, in the heat of the moment, want to be of any help.

It made sense, the little unwritten part of their code of conduct, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t annoying, or invasive. With a kryptonian clone who could hear through several meters of concrete listening in, there was no way that whatever Nightwing had to say would be kept private. He gave it an hour, at most, until everyone from Artemis to Zatanna knew everything that Nightwing had said.

Bart also wasn’t helped to feel comfortable by the way that Nightwing had called him in. Straight after his last delivery, commanding and strong, the order had come. Return to base for a debriefing. With Kaldur in Atlantis conferring with King Orin, Nightwing was in charge for the days he was gone. An order for a debriefing after a mission that was really him just being an ultra-fast postal service, obviously there was no way that it was an actual debrief, which made him worried that, somehow, he was gonna get moded by this.

Which sucked. After the dressing down he’d gotten for throwing his communicator into a pile of shit (well, a tunnel full of it, technically), he’d been careful. Kid Flash had toed the line, done what people had wanted, and not complained out loud that people were treating him like a high speed car instead of a person. He hadn’t scavenged anything from the labs he was sent to. He hadn’t incited any sort of violence. No one had shot at him. On a relative scale, he thought he was doing pretty good.

Nightwing apparently didn’t agree. Kid Flash put on his most innocent attitude, the one that told people that, no, he hadn’t been anywhere near the explosion, why did they ask, and waited for whatever was coming.

“I have…” there was a pause, deliberate, no doubt, as the black clothed hero pulled up a computer screen, “three hundred and seventy eight different reports.”

“Okay, I seriously didn’t do ANYTHING.” Bart said quickly, holding up his hands.

He got an eyebrow raise in return, and, yep, that was definitely learned from Alfred and his ninja-butler ways. “These are the reports of the deliveries you’ve made.”

“…Oh.”

“Taking into account that you’ve been doing those missions for fifteen days, that’s an average of twenty five point two for every day.”

“The, uh, decimal point probably wasn’t necessary.”

“You have,” Nightwing continued, “been to Africa, Europe, America both north and south, Australia, Asia, Russia, and Antarctica. In short, every major land mass on the planet. You have taken bio-samples, weapons, time sensitive equipment, robotics that we don’t want to trust in the Zeta tubes, organs for transplantation, an entire set of scientific reports for a physics conference after the first set was stolen, a live sample of stromatolite, and a teddy bear. The only complaint we’ve gotten is that the time sensitive equipment had some very strange readings, which wasn’t so much of a complaint as much as a joyful exclamation and an opportunity to compare readings with the Flash, and one other report that a new piece of tech from Star labs seems to have taken a detour through the Bermuda Triangle. Again, they got data out of it, but they were less pleased about this one.”

“So… I’ve done a _good_ job?”

“Perfect.” Nightwing said easily, but he still wasn’t smiling. “You have done everything we’ve asked. Run every route, taken anything we wanted, delivered it hours before anyone was expecting it to show up, and in perfect condition. Kid Flash, you’ve fulfilled _every single_ parameter to _every single_ mission you’ve been assigned for the last fifteen days, and the only casualty is a communications device.”

“Good… whyaren’tyoucrash?”

“You’ve done every. Single. Thing. And you’ve done them _perfectly_.” Nightwing glowered at him. “So out with it. Nothing ever goes THIS flawless on anything we do, even and especially not if it’s supposed to be a punishment.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong!”

“Deflection.” He noted. “Just because you haven’t done against wrong, doesn’t mean you haven’t done _something_.”

“I can’t believe this.” Bart backed up, trying to think of escape routes. “I actually can’t believe this, you’re punishing me for doing everything RIGHT? Also, how is it that everyone is irritatingly good at telling when I’m lying?”

“It’s harder to tell when you’re actually making something up. Easier to spot omission. Sometimes.” It was like Nightwing was treating the conversation like an exchange of intelligence, bartering and selling secrets in exchange for others. “Now, what did you do?”

“Apart from the Bermuda Triangle thing? Not much. It isn’t any worse than the incident with the dress.” A nervous glance to either side showed that even if Bart ran from the room at that second, he’d gathered enough interest for an explanation to be unavoidable. “I found a gun. It was broken, I fixed it, I used it to shoot trash, it’s all crash. And someone bribed me with cookies, which was why I was trying to get rid of the trash in the first place. I’ve been good! Seriously, that’s the end of it, I’ve been good!”

“I truly and sincerely doubt that. Who was it who fed you?”

“Er… can’t tell you. Sorry.”

Nightwing’s eyes narrowed. “Why not?” He asked, and his voice took on a more threatening tone.

“Well, you know him, and Robin knows him, and Batgirl knows him, but no one else does. Except for Batman, Batman knows him, duh, but-“

“What. Do. You. Mean.”

“Erm…” He tried to phrase it in a way that didn’t involve letting everyone in the room know who Batman was. “You know the ninja butler who taught you that glare and the raised eyebrow thing?”

Nightwing’s brow furrowed up as he tried to translate the new code, but it was Red Robin who figured it out first. “You got into the BATCAVE?!”

Huh. Apparently he had been listening in after all.

“You WHAT?!” Nightwing strode forward.

Bart zipped out of the way, but quickly found that his path was blocked by anther advancing child of the Batman, Red Robin’s hands clenched into fists. “How did you get in?!”

“What were you DOING?!” Nightwing shouted in tandem.

“The security protocols-

“Wait- _cookies? Trash?_ GUNS?!”

“You shouldn’t even be able-

“GUNS, BART?!”

“As far as I know-“

“Okay, yep, I’m gone.” He muttered, and ran off to hide.

Three hours later and Jaime was herding him toward the Zeta tubes, chivvying him along like a little lost lamb while Bart protested, loudly and at length. Hiding behind Jaime within the cavernous depths of his university’s library was a fantastic idea, and no one had thought to look for him, but it came with the downside that eventually he’d get too annoying or too bored, and Jaime would drag him back to the nightmare theoretically facing him back at the Watchtower.

Red Robin had seemed more curious than worried, but Nightwing… was not a happy birdy. Not with him, anyway. So Bart grumbled and moaned and whined as he gave in to the inevitable force of Jaime’s speech about facing up to what he’d done, and let himself be dragged into a Zeta tube, rather than running to the next country.

When they were spat out by the tube, Nightwing was waiting for them. No one else was, not within sight, but there was a distinctly green fly on the wall, so the gossip circles were still running then. Bart shook Jaime off, carefully, and stepped forward. “So…”

Nightwing led them both away from the cavernous central room, into the depths of the Watchtower and the levels unofficially reserved for the Team. They fly, Bart noticed, followed them.“You were telling the truth.”

“Yeah?”

“About the Batcave.” Nightwing clarified. “I just checked, and you were. Leaving out the rules you just broke, the worrying fact that we might have a security breach to clear up, and the speech I’m going to have to write to explain this to Batman… why?” He sat down, not onto a desk chair or imposing throne, but onto a couch. “Why did you want to get in there?”

“You’re… strangely calm about all of this.” He said cautiously. It was nice that Blue armoured up behind him. Helped him think that, if this was what a killing rage looked like on Batman’s son, he’d be able to, y’know, run. And drag Jaime’s stupid self-sacrificial ass along behind him.

“I’m giving you a chance to explain yourself.”

He looked Nightwing over again. Everything about his posture screamed relaxed confidence, each muscle loose and easy in a way that was never natural, but whatever was underneath, it wasn’t anger. Or, it wasn’t as much anger as he’d thought there’d be. “You talked to ninja butler.” He guessed.

People had got to stop looking surprised when he said stuff. “Yes? He has a name, you know.”

“Yeah, but I figure you don’t want me blurting that out.” Bart pointed out. “You really want to know why I held my little invasion of the Batcave?”

Nightwing just nodded.

“’Kay. Blue, you go make yourself a sandwich or something, this won’t take long. Actually, go get me food too!”

“Not your maid, hermano.” Jaime rolled his eyes, but the armour put itself away and he trudged off looking more at ease, so that was a success.

Bart decided to spill out the story before Nightwing’s patience ran out. “Kay so I’d just finished anotherjobandyouknowhowthosepeopletreatmereallyrudeterrible don’tlikeitanyway thanitwasGothamandIdidn’twanttodomoredeliveries becauseitsinsultingandsothecmmunicatorandtheriver andthebatcaveittookmeages tofindtheplacebutIcangothroughwallssoy’know sercuritycan’treallystopme andIgotlosinsideandthanitwastheBatmobile andIwenthteoppsiteway andtherewasanoisesoIhidbutthentherewerecookies Icouldsmellthemandheycookies they’renicesoIwentoutandtherewasAlfredandhe’sreallysmart andsortofscary andIdidn’tknowwhohewasbecauseheisn’tinthehistory, andthenhegavemetrashtohold soIgotridfthetrashbyshootingitwithagun. And yeah. That’s it. Except for the part where he gave me more cookies,” he paused. “They were good cookies.”

“Perfect, Bart.” His leader said calmly. “Now, hold on while I play that back at a speed where it sounds coherent.”

“Oops.”

“At less you’re not stressed enough to start speaking real slow.” Jaime appeared over his shoulder, dropping a sandwich into Bart’s lap.

“You are so my maid.”

“Are not.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

He grinned, bored with the usual routine. “Sideways.”

“Horizontal.” Jaime said without missing a beat.

“Vertical.”

“Port.”

“Starboard. I should get you a maid’s outfit.” He teased.

Jaime actually blushed and ducked down, which was odd. It wasn’t like Blue to miss out on an opportunity to point out that of the two of them; Bart was the only one to have actually worn a dress.

“I’ll never understand you two.” Nightwing sighed, finished with Bart’s story. “Alright, so let me get this straight. You weren’t picked up by the security because…”

“Going too fast.” Bart answered.

“And you got your way in by phasing through a wall. And the, uh, ‘ninja butler’ lured you out with cookies?”

“What? They were good cookies!”

“Leaving aside that bed decision… you decided that shooting trash was the best way to get rid of it?”

“Look, dude, you can ask your ninja butler about what I did. I don’t remember what I ate for breakfast today, why would I remember why I thought shooting rubbish was a good idea?” he shrugged, a quick, rapid movement that ran through his body and upset the sandwich on his lap. Jaime caught the food with the ease of long practise. “I was bored, I was hungry, it was four days ago; the motives behind stuff I do aren’t exactly rocket science. Well, they could be rocket science, that stuff’s easy but-“

“I think I get what you mean.” Nightwing raised an eyebrow.

“I know where you learnt that expression!” he crowed.

“…Bart.”

“Sorry, yeah, what?”

“Look, when you ran off, we had a talk with… the person you encountered-“

“He-who-shall-not-be-named.”

“Right,” Nightwing said, a degree more irritated. “Anyway, we talked with him. You were apparently an interesting houseguest, but not too much of a bother. He sounded like he was talking about a stray puppy that had turned up on the doorstep, actually, so I don’t think he hates you. You’ve already been proved to have kept some other secrets that you know about my, er, family, so we aren’t going to punish you for anything other than the communicator you destroyed. But you’re back on active missions. Immediately. If you’re bored enough to break into the Batcave… we’d all do better with you back with us.”

“Here here.” Jaime agreed from behind him.

“Aw, you know you love me really,” Bart teased.

“I actually despise you.”

“You wuuuuuv me.”

“I hate you.”

“I’m the light of your life!”

“The bane of my existence.”

“The Spock to your Kirk!”

Jaime shuddered. “I should never have let you anywhere near those films.”

“No, no you shouldn’t’ve.”

“Ese, I know that shouldn’t’ve isn’t a word, and I have two languages to remember, not just one.”

“It was real in the future!”

At that, Blue turned around and looked at him, examining him and making Bart want to fidget. “No,” he said finally, “no it wasn’t.”

“Damnit.”

“I win.”

“Hey, where’d Nightwing go?”

“Eh.” Blue shrugged, finishing off his sandwich. “I dunno.”

“Beast Boy’s gone too. ‘Least the rest of the Team will know what’s up.”

“Yeah, but… the Batcave, Bart? Really?”

“I can’t be held responsible for the shit I do when I’m bored.”

“Yes you can.”

“No I can’t.”

Bickering, going off to get more sandwiches (Jaime didn’t have to eat like Bart did, but it was nice that he stayed with him), they cleared away the dishes and moved off to a room that felt less like something out of a cop TV show’s interrogation cell, Bart merrily trying to think of another name for Alfred that he could use in public without referring to the man as Ninja Butler.

Hours later, he was summoned for a mission. Jaime made his excuses and went back to his schoolwork, and Kid Flash ran to meet whatever was happening. Red Robin was there, with a screen up, and Beast Boy, Bumblebee, and Batgirl were all looking on intently. No one looked surprised that he was there, so the gossip circles must have been running smoothly.

“What’s up?” he said by greeting, looking over Bumblebee’s shoulder.

“You, apparently.” She smirked. “When did you get so tall? I can remember when you were the same size as Beast Boy, you two barely came up to my shoulders.”

“Hey!” Beast Boy squawked. “I think you’ll find that I can look over your shoulder too.”

“Well, yeah, but you have the innate ability to turn into a giraffe, so…” Bart shrugged.

“Yes, very nice banter, very clever. Shut up and listen, will you?” Batgirl pushed Red Robin out of the way and took over the screen. “We’re splitting into Alpha and Beta. Alpha’s Red, Bumblebee, and Kid Flash, Beta’s me and Beast Boy. The facility we’re infiltrating is one of Queen Bee’s, but she isn’t in the country at the moment. The UN’s got her up on charges of a humanitarian sort, so she’s not going to be back in Biyalea anytime soon.”

“Kay, but why’re we trying to mode her? Why not Lex or any of the other members of the Light?” Bart asked.

“Uh, dude. The thing with Nightwing, Kaldur and the fourth of spades? Duh.” Garfield said, as though any of what had just come out of his mouth made sense.

At Bart’s uncomprehending look, Bumblebee stepped in to rescue him. “A mission that happened while you were on delivery duty. Gave us a clue,” she summarized.

“Oh.”

“Anyway, we’re going in to search for relevant information.” Batgirl steered them back on track. “For you, Bart, that means anything related to the employment of various villains to go and wreck stuff in certain places, or the records of boom-tube use getting those villains to where the Light wanted them to be.”

“Boom-tube, employment, got it.”

“Alpha will be going after the energy signatures of the boom-tubes and seeing if you can’t uncover any records, or, if you can get away with it without it being suspicious, sabotage the equipment. Beta will be going deep into the facility to try and access and download files that will hopefully relate to the payment of various villains for their work.” She shut off the screen. “Everyone got it?”

The chorus of agreements from around the room was enough to make her smile. Bart had to give Barbara credit, she wasn’t as creepy weird never-smiling as her Bat-companions, but she still managed to put the fear of god and dark places into everyone he’d ever met when she needed to.

They took the bio-ship, Beast Boy at the controls and the ship humming happily with her mistress’ brother leading her on. Which was actually kinda creepy when he thought about it. Bart wasn’t sure how alive the ship really was, or how intelligent, but the way that every surface twisted in and out and reformed and screens came and went, solid and liquid, definitely spoke of technology completely unlike anything he was familiar with, Reach or human.

Sometimes he was really interested in the machine. Sometimes she made him feel off-balanced and freaked out. It depended on the day.

Today was a ‘interested how does that work’ day, as he watched the ship chirp and ding at Beast Boy. Not her fault for being what she was. But, on the other hand, he didn’t like being in one place and doing one thing for such long periods. “Can I run?”

“Huh?”

“Can I run?” He repeated. “I wanna get out and run.”

“Isn’t that a waste of energy?” Red Robin pointed out, logical and making sense and all those other terrible things.

“Nah, I’ll be good, promise. And it’s not like it’ll slow us down, we’re over water, and I’ll get there before you do, even.” The bio-ship chirped, and Bart popped up in his seat. “Is that a challenge? Did I just get challenged?”

“Oh no. No. No, we are NOT doing this.” Batgirl scowled, pointing at Bart and the ship as a whole. “No.”

A hole appeared in the floor near his feet. “It was so a challenge,” Bart smirked, “you’re going to lose, lady.”

“We are NOT doing this! This, we are not doing, we are not, you hear me, we are-“

He jumped through the hole in the floor, as the ship slid down lower in the sky to let him. The speedster landed on the waves below, and fell down a trough in between one swell and another before he was able to right himself and start running, following the ship across the sea. He caught up, and saluted as he ran pass, staying just ahead of the ship in a deliberate taunt.

The ship charged him, trying what would have been a gentle poke, had it not been the length of a bus. Bart dodged easily and sped up, circling her once, twice, teasing her with a grin on his face. He laughed, and it rang clear, both parties still under the speed of sound.

Which meant that his communicator still worked. “Why’re you playing tag with our ride?” Bumblebee asked, her voice amused in his ear.

“Why not? You’re it!”

“Okay, that’s it,” Beast Boy sounded out. “We’re going to take you down, you fancy little runner!”

“You can try!” He shot back. “Bee, give us a countdown. Gar, give control over to the ship herself, I don’t trust your reflexes.”

“My reflexes are fine!”

“Not at the speeds we’ll be going, not this close to the water. Bee?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Despite her words, she sounded amused.

“Bart, wasn’t getting you back on missions supposed to _stop_ all of this hilarity?” Batgirl inquired.

“Just cause I’m back don’t mean you’ve moded me. Also; you said this was hilarity, you’re a co-conspirator now! Bee, countdown!”

“Five,” she said immediately, overriding whatever Batgirl was going to say, “four, three, two, one g-“

The rest of the word was lost in the burst of acceleration from the bio-ship. Bart sped up too, but his method was altogether quieter, if no less effective. He danced with the ship for a while, overtaking and being overtaken, but the next time he came by the window, Beast Boy, from inside, waggled a rude gesture at him.

They thought this was fast? They thought that they had a chance, outracing Kid Flash?

He grinned back, and it must have looked a little odd, if the expression he got in return was anything to go by, odd and competitive and slightly maniac. Then the world slowed around him, the bioship slowed to a crawl, and he started to really race.

Hard, rhythmic running, beating his mark into the water, at this speed like concrete. Not just travelling, not anymore, but sprinting, accelerating far beyond what any craft, Martian, Reach or Human, could ever hope to achieve. Bart dug a hand into the water, and slowed down just long enough to see the strange rippling tear, the sound wave he was outrunning cracking through the surface of the liquid and leaving it broken and cavernous.

Screw racing. This was just for fun.

When he actually came across the place they were supposed to be raiding, he groaned inaudibly, disappointed. Running was… easy. Simple, and absolutely in its totality free. Someday… someday he’d run, he’d just run, all along the Earth, not stopping for anything. Then he’d see how fast he could really go.

Of course, the advantages of stopping meant that his communicator was back to working order. Not that it ever broke, or anything. Since he hadn’t ever (almost ever, he wasn’t sure if time travel counted) gone faster than the speed of light, the electronics could still transmit. But above the speed of sound, any sound it emitted or recorded was just lost in the wind.

“Checking in. When do you guys think you’ll get here?”

“…Bart?”

“Hey Robin. Lemme guess, I won our race? Crash.”

“You’re there already?!”

“Yep.”

“…Really.”

“I swear on the Ninja Butler’s duster, dude. I’m here.”

“Right. We need to get you to stop calling him that.” Robin sounded distracted, probably by whatever bit of data they had their prodigious detective kid working on now.

“The BatButler!”

“No.”

“The Dark Duster!”

“No.”

“The-“

“No.”

“You’re no fun. I want Bluuuuuue.”

“Considering he’s pretty good at keeping you in line? The rest of us want him too.” The connection shut off.

It took five minutes for his patience to run out. At least he was getting better at waiting, then.

“Well,” he told a thing in the next field that could have been a cow, but looked more like a buffalo. “I’m bored.”

Who-knew-how-long later, the bio-ship finally made an appearance. She lowered herself to the ground, gently, and set herself down with struts formed from nothingness, resembling nothing more than a mantis perched on a leaf, delicate to look at but ready to pounce if a tasty looking bug happened to pass by.

“Finally.” He moaned, running a hand through his hair and looking up from the project he was working on. “You took forever! Why didn’t we just Zeta here?”

A protesting groan of metal came from the ship.

Batgirl strode past him in a flurry of cape and action. “I’m not going to ask about the daisy chain.”

“Best you don’t,” he agreed. “Hey, bio-ship, you want a consolation prize?”

When he draped the linked flowers over the ship’s helm, the noise she made was happy. Huh. Apparently every girl liked flowers, even if that girl was both alien and non-organic.

“…Did you seriously spend your time waiting for us braiding _daisies_?” Red Robin was looking at him like he was a puzzle piece that refused to fit. Good analogy, actually.

“Nope.” Batgirl turned back, caught Robin by his cape, and continued her march toward the hill overlooking their destination. “No. We aren’t talking about this. Bart can braid daisies, he can undo rope, he can put knots in the grass, he can braid Jaime’s hair for all I care, but I don’t want to hear about it. He is ridiculous. That’s it.”

He wasn’t strange. He was just bored, when you had all the time in the world and you still had to wait, be patient and wait for the others to play catch up, he got bored, and flowers got chained together. But that wasn’t the most worrying part of Batgirl’s statement. “Why do people always assume I’d braid _Blue’s_ hair? Why not Gar’s, or La’gaan’s, or-“

Bumblebee cut him off. “You spend like every freaking second of the day together, he’s pretty much the only one who can ever convince you _not_ to do something, and lately have you seen the way he looks at-“

“ _Mission_.” Batgirl snarled.

Everyone shut up.

The target soon became clear, and why they’d need two teams for it. Queen Bee was many things, a good deal of which were criminal, but she wasn’t stupid. The bundle of concrete and metal sitting in the semi-arid valley had guards, security thingy-ma-bobs that doubtlessly had names which Robin would recite for them if asked, and two different complexes, separated by a solid-looking concrete wall presented a fairly good challenge. Although Queen Bee didn’t get any points for camouflage. Sticking something like this in the middle of the desert wasn’t exactly subtle.

“Hey, Batgirl?”

She glowered at him, and he tried not to flinch. “What, Kid Flash.”

“We have Alpha and Beta, right? Two teams?”

“Yes.”

From what he could see, Bart could understand why they’d chosen people who could walk (well, run) through walls, shrink down tiny, and other inconspicuous things for the mission, not, say, Superboy. But they didn’t have Miss Martian, or the head ninja himself Nightwing along with them, and that didn’t add up, numbers wise. “So why does Alpha have three people and Beta only have two? We have enough meat back at base to even up numbers.”

She looked at him, and he didn’t appreciate how stunned her expression was. “That is actually an insightful and valid question.”

“Never thought I’d see the day.” Red Robin cut in with snark. Bart poked out his tongue.

“Originally, Guardian was coming.” Bumblebee put in, smiling a small, soft smile for her boyfriend so full of love and happiness that it made Bart want to drape daisy chains over her. “But he- Bart. Bart, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t covered in flowers a second ago.”

“The moment called for it.” He pointed out, because it was completely obvious.

“And, we’re back to the nuthouse.” Batgirl sighed, fishing out goggles to peer at the walls. Beside her, Red Robin did the same, but at a different section.

“I think you actually _try_ to be random.” Beast Boy crossed his arms.

“What? No. Look, clearly Karen needed flowers. Clearly.” All Bart got was sceptical looks from Beast Boy and Bumblebee. Batgirl and Red Robin didn’t even turn around. He tapped his foot on the ground, beating out a fast rhythm, one, one, two, three, five, eight, one-three. “Look, can I go in there and scout the place out? I promise I won’t-“

“No.” The way both members of the Batfamily managed to speak in synch was freaky. And crash. Mostly freaky.

“But-“

“No.” Again.

He subsided, and carrying on with the pattern, dropping down to flop next to Beast Boy and use his hands instead. Two-one, three-four, five-five, eight-nine… He’d gotten up to three-seven-eight-eight-nine-zero-six-two-three-seven-three-one-four-three-nine-zero-six, which was admittedly only the eighty first number in the sequence, before both of the apparent leaders of Alpha and Beta had finished their reconnaissance.

Bart opened his mouth to complain, and had one delicately covered hand shoved over his face to shut him up. Batgirl just stared at him, eyebrows up and a smile threatening at the corners of her lips, until he submitted to what was a hopeless case in the first place and shut up.

With a quick signal (and then when Beast Boy didn’t get it, a jerk to his collar), Beta squad moved off, both forms blurring into the dusk as they set about their task. Robin crouched down, opened up his computer, and proceeded to outline a plan of attack that Bart promptly forgot about five seconds after he was finished. He glanced over apologetically, and Robin rolled his eyes.

“Just don’t wander off.” Now that was an instruction he could remember.

Bart took another look at all the security, guns and all, which they’d have to sneak past. Okay. Maybe he couldn’t follow that instruction after all. “Um, Robin?”

“Hm?”

“I’m going to wander off, so…”

“No.” And that was very firm.

“No, seriously Red Robin, I need to wander off. I can meet you on the other side of the line of wire patrolled by people carrying guns, but I can’t stay with you.”

“Why not?” Even though it was a question, his tone was short.

“You and Bumblebee can sneak,” He gestured down at himself, “but even with this on stealth mode, I’m pretty damn obvious when I’m not moving at superspeed.”

“Point is?”

“I go in with you; we’ll all be spotted in ten seconds, max. The main thing on my side is my speed, and I can’t use that with you two losers. I’ll meet you on the other side, we won’t get shot at, and it’ll be crash.”

“Fine. Second watchtower, shadows there should be enough, and Bart? Don’t deviate from the plan.”

“I don’t get where you guys get this idea that I’m some sort of wildcard.” He said mulishly, but did as he was told.

Five minutes later, he managed to spot Bumblebee flying through a gap in the fence, and knew with sudden suspicion that Robin was standing directly behind him. Which was impossible, because he had his back to the wall, but if there had to be one phrase out of the English language that no one wearing a bat insignia understood, it was ‘impossible’. He turned round, and found a booted foot at eye-level.

“What the hell?” he kept his tone low. “When did you show up?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Red Robin snapped off the line he was hanging from, and landed in a crouch, feet absorbing both shock and sound from the manoeuvre. “Bee’s taking the trucks parked outside, we need to see if and how they’re smuggling tech. I’m going inside to see whether I can find records of boom tube use in the computers. You’re going to go check out the boom tubes themselves. Usually they’re quite portable, but-“

“These ones are made for cargo, which means they’re both permanent and bigger.” Bart finished for him in a whisper.

“Yes. Check for signs of constant use and see if you can find any obvious flaws for us to exploit. Also, if there’s cargo going out of Earth instead of coming in, I want to know what it is. Beta’s going after the records transporting humans, it wouldn’t hurt for us to find out something about the cargo shipping they’ve got going on here as well. Got it?”

“Yes.” Bumble Bee murmured.

“Crash.” Bart agreed with a mutter.

“Fine. Alpha squad, you have your targets. Spilt up and keep in contact.”

They separated, Bumble Bee flying off to shimmy her way under the canvas roofs of the trucks, Kid Flash zipping away and through the office buildings, trying to find an entrance to the lower levels (there were always lower levels), and Robin seemingly vanishing into the ether.

There weren’t any lifts, and the building was annoyingly free of obvious staircases, but the cargo had to come up from the boom tubes somewhere. It wasn’t as if this particular joint had a warehouse to put things in, either they were on the trucks, or they had to be near the boom tubes. The boom tubes themselves, if they were the sort to take cargo through them, would be permanent structures.

He could use that. Permanent structures…

That meant a permanent source of electricity to power them. And boom tubes or Zeta tubes, neither came with batteries, not if they were permanent structures, so the electricity had to come from generators. Generators would need fuel of their own, coal or petrol or diesel, and he saw a barrel full of the latter outside a very sturdy hut. Bingo. Kid Flash found the connecting lead running from the hut into what he’d thought had been guard barracks, shook his head, and followed it through the wall.

Inside, it _was_ guard barracks. Which was confusing, until he spotted the stairs in the corner. What better way to protect the thing you wanted to keep hidden than to put a whole squad of sleeping guards on top?

It was kinda irritating, whenever the villains did something clever. Actually, scratch that. It was ALWAYS irritating. Bart followed the electrical cable down to just under ground level, and found his target. The Fatherbox (and what was up with that _name_ ) was connecting to a series of interlocking disks, and those in turn spilled out into four circular plates that had to be where the cargo was supposed to arrive.

Apart from the boom tube construction itself, the room was basically empty. Bart didn’t know where the stuff they’d shipped in had got to, but maybe they never kept it in there, or the guards had just cleaned the room out to put it all into the trucks, because the one piece of technology remaining was a small little screen, displaying writing that he was fairly sure didn’t come from Earth.

Just to check, he grabbed the alien computer-ish thing and scrolled through it, hoping to come across something he was familiar with. Since he barely understood anything the Reach wrote down, let alone any other alien languages, his search was a futile one. Pocketing the tech to hand over later, he turned his attentions back to the boom tube contraption.

It was obviously used regularly, the tell-tale signs of wear and tear easy to see, marks and smudges and a tiny bit of sticky glue that had been left in an odd place. As for obvious flaws, the electrical cable was an easy target, running fifty meters over open ground to provide the power for the machine, but it wasn’t exactly irreplaceable. The boom tube itself could be taken apart and put back together, presumably for transportation, but the only part of it that was really vital was the Fatherbox. He hadn’t had a chance to play around with one before, but the League had files on tech like this. It was a living computer, or it was supposed to be, and apart from opening boom tubes, had also added tracking kyrptonian dna and interfacing with other alien technology to its skill set.

This one looked old, and well used. Living or not, the thing was battered and scratched, light off and powered down. But Bart still wouldn’t call it a flaw.

However… Batgirl had said that they were looking to covertly sabotage the boom tubes. And every exit portal thingy there was connected to the one Fatherbox. So if Bart could take that off mode, the whole operation would be shut down until they could find another Fatherbox, and those things didn’t exactly grow on trees. But the key word in ‘covertly sabotage’ was ‘covert’. He didn’t want to just wreck it and have every guard in the base coming down on his head.

Carefully, he flipped the computer box over. It still didn’t turn on or beep or bring the Light down on his head, so maybe it couldn’t function without the constant electricity to boost it up and let it open more than one boom tube at once. Probably a safety feature to keep it from overloading, if he had to guess. A panel in the middle was easily opened, and he peered at the insides. They looked remarkably sturdy, dull and worn, but still functional and clearly operational. Hm. The parts were worn. Worn down parts failed.

With a smile, he removed a little block of a metal he was pretty sure wasn’t native to Earth, and began vibrating his hand against it, wearing down a thin barely there trickle of dust. He put the part back, and got another one out. It took time, and made him reconsider how exciting missions were supposed to be, but Bart managed to repeat the process on a couple of what he thought were major components of the box, and put them back into their configuration just slightly off. It wouldn’t be enough to stop the smuggling operation immediately, but now what had been worn was now wornerer. The outside of the Fatherbox still looked the same, but inside, its parts had just been subjected to years of wear and tear.

The Fatherbox itself was interesting, though. He wondered if the Justice League had one in their storage that he could take apart. It’d be cool to know how they worked.

However, while this one appeared to be sleeping, there was no telling when the thing would wake up. So he left, taking the alien computer thing in the small compartment in the glove of his costume but leaving everything else, on the surface at least, untouched. He found Robin in the offices of the place; merrily dancing his way through what amounted to cyber-security there.

“You all good?”

“Yep.” The hacker replied without looking up. “I take it you’re finished?”

“Perfectly. The boom tubes are in a secure place, but they’re all connected to the one Fatherbox and power supply. Also, the Fatherbox itself is, um, _worn down_. Or now it is, anyway.”

“…Right. I’ve almost finished too. Stay here with me; Bumblebee’s the only one who can get away with running about in the middle of the parking lot.”

Bart frowned. Something wasn’t adding up. “Hey, Robin?”

“Hm?”

“Why are there two office blocks? Two separate facilities?”

“Why should I know?”

“It’s just…” he waved his hands around, “this place is awful big for just a cargo port. It doesn’t need an office this big, let alone a second one next door.”

“Exactly.” Robin snapped his glowing screen off and took the lead back from the computer. “That’s why we have two squads. Beta’s looking at the obvious boom tube links and the cargo being transported; Alphas investigating what the building on the other side of that wall is doing there, and what its being used for. Good question, Bart, very clever, but we have it covered.”

“Oh, um, crash.” Damn. He’d thought he’d spotted something that they’d overlooked. “Anything for me to do, then?”

“Nope. If you can’t stand waiting around here, go back to the bio-ship and daisy chaining.”

When Robin turned his back, Bart took a moment to glare at him. Daisy chaining actually seemed preferable to being treated like he was an idiot. He didn’t have to brood to be intelligent, no matter what the example most of the heroes around him set.

Although he did stay, silent and waiting, until Robin had finished his work, so maybe the taunt had done what it was supposed to.

With a quick whispered conversation, they met up with Bumblebee, and Kid Flash darted ahead again as the other two found their way past security. As always, it was easier getting out than going in. Guards watched the sky, the horizon, the rocks and the ground, not the buildings behind them. They reconvened at the bio-ship, and set about with more waiting, biding their time until Beast Boy or Batgirl checked in. Just because Robin was looking at him funny, Bart started on his daisy chains again.

Actually, he didn’t know anything about plants but daisies grew in backyards and parks, not in the desert, so he wasn’t sure what those flowers were. It didn’t matter particularly. The bio-ship still cooed when he draped them across her nose, and Red Robin still followed his movements like he was planning on committing Bart to Arkham Asylum.

Sometime after he finished stringing his fourth garland of flowers round the inside of the bio-ships cabin, he looked out to see Batgirl conferring with Robin, and Beast Boy poking at the chain on the ships’ nose. The bio-ship formed up a hook for him to hang the last of his chain on, and he snagged it on the suddenly solid piece of metal, thankful the she hadn’t formed it right under his hand. After the second time that had happened and the second very high pitched squeak he’d made in response, she was being more careful not to startle him. Which was nice. A very considerate aircraft, she was.

Batgirl came up the ramp into the ship, blinked, snorted her amusement and went to sit down, twirling round on her chair lazily. “It went well then?” Bart asked.

“Yep. Got what we needed, hard to find, but it was there. Nightwing and Red Robin are going to have a lovely time, geeking out over the encryption. You?”

“No problems. We spilt up so I don’t know what Bumblebee did.” He sat down in another seat, draped himself over to sit facing backwards, his arms hanging limply off the sides. “I caught up with Robin at the end there, he looked perfectly happy. And I found the boom tubes and sabotaged them.”

“Yeah?” Barbara was clearly a lot more relaxed now that the mission was over, her body language loose and calm rather than the tense stillness it had been before. “What’d you do?”

“Found the Fatherbox, took off a back panel, and added extra wear and tear to the parts inside. Pretty simple and the Fatherbox’s been used for multiple boom tube use over a number of years, so you’d expect its parts to be worn down anyway. This way, they’ll think it just stopped working of natural causes.”

“Good job.”

“Thanks, sounds like what you did went off crash as well.”

“Don’t think we’ll ever get you talking like a normal person, will we?” She teased.

“You’ll never take me off mode!”

“That’s what I thought.”

The rest of both squads trailed in, flower hangings earning a shrug and a glance from Bumblebee and Robin, and a significant wrinkled-up-face from Beast Boy, before the green furred teenager took the wheel. “So, um, we can go?”

“Yes. And before you ask, the flowers were Bart’s idea, and the bio-ship seems to love them.” Robin said, happily scrolling through all the new data he had.

The ship gave a cheery sort of hum, and accepting that for whatever it meant, Beast Boy took them up and away as the windows took on the special sort of shimmer that meant they were blending into the clouds and blue air far better than any chameleon could ever hope to. He still wasn’t sure how the Martians pulled that trick off. Photo sensitive receptors in their skin sounded like something straight out of Star Trek (Jaime was right, it had been very, very dangerous to show Bart those movies) and he didn’t think he could say it with a straight face. Maybe he could bribe the bio-ship to explain with more daisy chains?

The ship chirped at him, and a hold opened up to deposit something in his lap. Bart tensed, uncomfortable, but it was only a separate, smaller chain of daisies. “Huh. I thought I hung everything up. You want me to put them over the console?”

An off key beep vetoed that idea. Bumblebee’s chair lit up.

“Oh! Are these the flowers I put on her?”

Confirmation, and the chair sidled closer along the floor.

“I completely agree.” He got up and zipped over to his older teammate, draping the chain once more around her neck. “There. All is right in the world.”

“Why’d you even give those to her anyway?” Beast Boy asked from the pilot’s seat.

Bumblebee raised her eyebrows, Batgirl turned to glance over, Robin stopped his rapid scrolling through his precious data, and even the bio-ship squeaked inquiringly as she slid smoothly through the sky.

 “Your guess would be as good as mine,” Bart shrugged. “I, um, think it made sense at the time?”

 


	7. Part 6

“Come on, Bart.” A hand tugged him away from the couch.

Bart squawked, in what might not have been the pinnacle of his always graceful protests. He had his reasons, though, mainly because Beast Boy’s furry tail and one of his legs was trapping his feet, and he was half sprawled on Cassie, who made a fantastic pillow mainly because she had a habit of automatically petting anything that crawled into her lap. Kid Flash and Beast Boy both used that to their advantage. Red Robin made no comments about such things.

“Come on.” Miss Martian repeated, smiling gently. “You’re the reason that there are dead flowers all through the bio-ship. You’re coming to help clean her up.”

“But the best part’s coming!” At least this protest was coherent.

“How would you know?” Wonder Girl let his head go, and he pouted. “You haven’t seen this one.”

“Shh, evil doom bringer. You’re ruining my plan.”

“No, you’re coming with me.” Miss Martian tugged at him again, this time without actually touching him, and Beast Boy uncurled from his legs.

“I hate you aaaaaall,” he whined, because the pleasant tangle of limbs and warmth and petting and movie that he was dreaming about was rapidly becoming less and less of a reality. “You’re ruining my liiiiiiife.”

“Your afternoon, maybe.” He was left floating along behind the Martian as she continued toward the docking bay. “But I don’t think it’ll take long, mister superspeed.”

“Nasty, evil, life ruining, not crash, moding…” He kept up a backtrack of complaints, but stopped actively struggling.

“Nope, you’re the one who made them. You need to clean them up.”

“But the flowers are pretty! Why’d you want to take ‘em off?”

“They are very pretty, even if I’m not sure why you made them. Wilted flowers, however -not as beautiful.”

“But-“

“The flower chains have been up there for a week and a half, Bart. There isn’t much colour left, and I don’t want to spend hours cleaning them all up.”

“So instead you make me do it,” he said grumpily.

“It’ll only take you a couple of seconds. Besides, I’ll help too.” And Miss Martian was so pleasant and slightly apologetic, he found himself agreeing with her. Agreeing with her, and cursing himself for doing so, of course.

The bio-ship extended a ramp for them to walk up, and he was lowered to the floor at last. Looking around, Bart did have to agree with the ship’s owner. While the ones on the outside of the hull had dropped off seconds after the ship took off, the garlands on the inside had been left where he’d put them, constructs from the ship still keeping them up.

She knew why they were there. With a sigh of creaking metal, the constructs retracted, and the chains of nearly completely dried out flowers fell down to the floor, a few caught by Miss Martian. Bart started scooping up the rest, but he could see the problem. Dead flowers shed petals, stems, pretty much anything and everything they were made of, so the floor looked like the scene of a crime after Poison Ivy came and went. He found a trash bag left over from whenever someone had last gone grocery shopping, and went to work, because at the end of the day, this had been his idea and his fault. M’gann was being very nice about it really.

Eventually, they had a bag crammed full of dead plant matter, and M’gann was busy convincing the ship to give up the one flower in the corner of the roof that the ship seemed convinced they couldn’t see. “I’ll, um, go put this away?”

“Mm? Oh, yeah, sure. Now, you know that having flowers in here is nice, but the biological matter really isn’t feasible to have when we’re-“

He left to the sounds of the lecture on space travel and why the ship shouldn’t take plants into it long-term. Sphere beeped at him from her place over in the corner, but the rest of the hallways were empty, and he stuffed the bag into the kitchen trash bin under the sink without anyone noticing and telling him that it was overflowing already and didn’t need anything added to it.

The kitchen was a strange place. Although both Team and League used the Watchtower, the place was carved from a gigantic asteroid, so room to do their own things wasn’t exactly in short supply. The League kept to the rooms they used more frequently, and the Team had their own space, mainly because forcing adults to spent long periods in close proximity to teenagers hadn’t worked out for anyone involved. At some point in time, with some unspoken rules that they’d never spoken about so Bart wasn’t sure how they worked, it had become a game to avoid taking out the trash, so it was always overflowing and leaking crisp wrappers onto the floor. Usually the only time it would ever get emptied was when a member of the League popped in to the Team’s section and shrieked in despair, before going on a tidying binge and calling the senior members of the Team together to try to effect some sort of order. The seniors knew that it was hopeless, so after a day of the place looking spotless, everything would descend back into anarchy and no one would bring the tidying thing up until the next time the cycle began again. Just so long as nothing was actively a biological hazard, things passed pretty much unnoticed.

The same thing happened with the fridge. Not only could Bart not remember when it was last cleaned (he wasn’t sure he even knew how to clean a fridge), but the products in it varied, and varied wildly. Depending on who had been shopping, there’d be different things in it. For example, for all his maturity, the food Nightwing brought in was almost entirely sugar, but La’gaan, when he went shopping, seemed incapable of remembering that Jaime hated seafood, and that the only person beside him to think that starfish were edible was Aqualad. Usually, with the exception of La’gaan’s week to shop, the best food would be taken and gone within an hour, leaving odd combinations of things for the rest of the Team to survive on.

Like that day, for instance. Bart opened the fridge, and his options were either the seaweed lurking at the back, a bit of cheese he was sure hadn’t started out that colour, and eggs. He rolled his eyes, but grabbed the eggs, holding two in the palm of one hand carefully as he tried to remember not to break them. Yeah, the kitchen was strange. But after helping out at the Garrick’s, doing chores and making sure everything kept on keeping on there, it was sort of relaxing not to have to do that at the Watchtower with the Team. And sort of disgusting. He had to find an excuse for a Justice League member to come around some time soon.

Snack in hand; he returned to the den of popcorn smelling things, where Cassie grinned at him and Beast Boy waved one unidentifiable clawed paw. “What’d I miss?”

A hand was neither green nor white waved at him from the couch next to the den of fur and blonde hair that was where he’d last seen Wonder Girl and Beast Boy. “Hey, hermano.”

“Jaime!” He buzzed over. “You’ve finished your studying?”

“I, um, yeah,” there was a short fumble as Blue stole his food, “gimme those, why’ve you got _eggs,_ Bart–Bart?”

“What’s up?”

“Why are you crawling into my lap?”

“Huh?” He looked up, confused. This was normal. Pretty much all of the younger members of the Team did this, crawled over and around and on top of each other, shoving and pushing and squirming until they found a comfortable arrangement of feet, hair, and whatever other appendages they were currently sporting.

But Jaime was looking down at him, and his expression was strange, like he was worried or hoping for something or nervous or uncomfortable and, right, yeah, the whole gay thing, Bart had told him, and now he didn’t want the speedster curling up in his lap anymore.

He battled, for half a second, between a desire to glare and protest the his sexuality wasn’t contiguous, laugh it off and make a joke, or just leave, but ended up quickly scooting away to the other end of the sofa with a mumbled apology. Then Bart realised that one of Cassie’s arms was free, hanging over the side of the cushions on her couch, and that he didn’t have to sit with someone who thought that Bart might suddenly jump him.

Switching places in the blink of an eye and flopping down to push his head under Cassie’s hand, he didn’t miss Jaime’s guilty and quietly unhappy look, but he also didn’t care. Definitely not. Nope, not at all. It wasn’t like he’d made an _effort_ not to think of his Teammates that way, it wasn’t like he was still the same person even if Jaime knew something new about him now, it wasn’t like he’d _never_ try _anything_ with someone who didn’t want it. No, he was completely indifferent.

A couple of mindless and unrealistic fight scenes later, a shadow passed in front of the screen. Kaldur paused on his quiet way, and came back, careful on his second run past not to obstruct the television. He crouched down next to Bart. “Why are you irked, my friend? You usually look as happy as any pup to have your head scratched.”

Bart didn’t answer, keeping his attention on the movie he’d forgotten the name of and scowling.

It took a minute for the leader of the Team to speak again. “…I must request your help, Kid Flash.”

“Sure.” He heard the order and got up, Cassie’s hand falling away.

The Atlantian led him away from the movie room and down several hallways before he stopped to pin Bart down with that assessing gaze again. “You were sulking.”

“No I wasn’t.”

“And I think I know what about.” Kaldur continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “You would not have been sitting next to Cassandra and Garfield if they had been the ones you were disagreeing with, we have not run out of food, so that is not the issue, and Jaime was very determinedly watching that film without looking at you, or you at him.”

“Actually, we have pretty much run out of food, so if you could go get some more?”

“I will put it on my to-do list, even though I seem to remember a conversation two weeks ago where you professed to be happy to do the grocery shopping. You are arguing with Blue Beetle?”

He shut his mouth and glared at Kaldur’s webbed toes. “You don’t actually need my help with anything, do you.”

“You would be helpful, but I will admit you are not crucial.” His smile was kind and understanding and horrible. “Would you like to talk about what is bothering you both?”

“No. Decidedly not. Nope, no, nada, negative and can I go back to staring at a screen while trying not to glare at my best ‘friend’ out of the corner of my eye now.” He didn’t phrase it as a question. Although the gossip circles were inevitable and mostly useful, he’d never had to deal with Jaime being the one people were politely inquiring about in the spirit of Team unity.

“Come along.” Kaldur didn’t phrase that as an inquiry either, the bastard.

Resigned to letting senior members of the Team drag him about all afternoon, and deep down not that bothered, because the movie wasn’t that great and Jaime was being weird and he could use something else to focus on, he really could, Bart followed Aqualad through the maze-like hallways of the Watchtower. He recognised their general route, downwards, into the heart of the place and where the sensitive, valuable or delicate stuff was stored. If that was where they were going, he might see something interesting after all.

“So, you and Jaime-“

“Where are we going?”

“We are going to review the data that has been collected. It is a combination of everything we know or have guessed so far. From the data a connection can, hopefully, be drawn. Jaime’s been watching you, Bart, very strangely, why-“

“Kaldur, in case the abrupt subject change was too subtle, let me say this clearly. I don’t want to chat about this. Perfectly happy to help you out, dude, but not if this is all some cover story just to pry into my personal business. So, am I actually going to be of some help? Or am I wandering back upstairs to watch the movie again.”

“You will be of help.” Kaldur acknowledged. “I am not sure it will interest you, but your assistance would be welcome.”

“Great then.” The doors in front of them hissed open, and they came out into the huge virtual training room that had replaced the one in the centre of Mount Justice when it had blown up all those years ago. The usual suspects, Red Robin and Nightwing, were taking up space, but a variety of other heroes were standing with glowing screens in front of them too, including the Martian Manhunter, Batman, Zatanna and Guardian. “Why’re we here?”

“Screen usage.” The Batman spoke, and Bart startled away from the dark figure. “We can set up more individual screens, all still linked back to the server, here than anywhere else in the… Aqualad, explain why is he hiding behind you.”

“Theninja-butlerlikesmeyoucan’tkillme.” Bart blurted out.

In the corner of his eye, both former Robins flinched, and turned to look at each other.

“…That makes even less sense than what you usually come out with, Kid Flash.”

“Yeeeeeah…” He muttered.

Batman’s attention fixed itself on him. He wondered if there was a way to get it off. “He says you are allowed back, if you don’t blow anything up.  I’m not sure how you managed to stain the concrete green, but it was very impressive.”

“Hey, thanks- Wait, the concrete turned green?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve, um, checked it for radiation?”

“I didn’t think to.” He scowled. “Obviously, I should have been my first thought after learning of your visit. Obviously. It isn’t paint?”

“Yeah, no, I’d really get on to that if I was you. The radiation from that gun wasn’t harmful, but…”

“Batman.” The Martian Manhunter spoke up, but he wasn’t the only one looking at them oddly. “Would you care to explain what you and Kid Flash are conferring about? It is… most puzzling.”

“No,” Batman replied. “Nothing for you to worry about. Although Bart, if you ever feel the need to invade like that again, please target one of our enemies, rather than me.”

“Yep, got it, thanksfornotkillingme.”

When no other conversation started up, Batman turned his intensity back to his screen. Feeling like he’d just escaped a nuclear blast and somewhat petrified that he apparently gained Batman’s approval to visit again, Bart scurried backwards. A polite hand on his elbow steered him toward a vacant screen, and he jerked his head in thanks to Kaldur before the Team leader drew away to find his own spot to occupy. Ironically, his condition that he wanted to go back to staring at a screen and not thinking about Jaime looked like it was going to be met.

The reason for having so many people collected together soon reared its head. If they wanted to do an extensive study of any evidence, it was best to do it with just a few people all going over the information together, but if they had to get their way through a lot of data quite fast, they needed more eyes looking at more different things. The sort-of-hidden study session in the innards of the Watchtower definitely fell into the latter category. Looking around the room, some people there, Hawkman and Zatanna and Icon, they weren’t generally considered great for detective work. That had probably been the only reason he was allowed in. Like Kaldur had said, he could be useful, but he was by no means crucial to the operation.

As he delved into the shifting information, he clicked the top right corners of the pieces he thought would be useful, sending them off for further examination. The data that was obviously completely useless, brought into the mess by computer error he deleted, and the rest fed itself back into a loop to be looked at again the next time he came across it. It was, if not mindless work, not riveting at the very least, but the boring stuff made up seventy or eighty per cent of what any one mission entailed, and it was a necessary task. Bart descended into a lull of identifying and discarding, deleting and going back through the queue; half of him focused on the task at hand, the other half unashamedly free to wander.

Of course, the very second he was left idle, his thoughts went to the one thing he was trying to ignore. It was like when he was trying to remember some half-forgotten fact, only to give up and do something else until the answer leapt out and surprised him with its clarity. Except this was more annoying, if no less intentional.

The thing was, he could have predicted Jaime not being okay with everything. But what he hadn’t thought would happen was that Jaime would say he was okay with who Bart was, and then so blatantly be _not_ okay with it. Call him stupid, but he’d had more faith that if his friend was uncomfortable with him, he’d tell Bart instead of acting all weird around him until Bart took the hint. Actually, not all of his behaviour had been weird. A fortnight after telling Blue what gender he dated, and most of the time, Jaime had been cool, just like he normally was, the easy rhythm between them both unbroken.

But then Bart would climb onto his lap (platonically, platonically, he wouldn’t let himself think about his Teammates that way) or he’d sit on the table in front of him and suddenly Jaime would act all weird and shove him away. Maybe that was it. Proximity, maybe Jaime was trying to be cool with it but whenever Bart invaded his personal space too much he didn’t like it. That made sense. Although Bumblebee and Kaldur’s comments about how Jaime was looking at him still remained a puzzle.

If Blue was making the effort to be accepting, then things would improve. He could trust that, Jaime had to be one of the, if not the most, kindest people he knew. He’d just have to grin and bear it for now, Bart decided. Everything would work itself out, given time. Waiting for something wasn’t in his skill set, but he could do this. For now, he wouldn’t go close to Blue, and their interactions would go back to being crash, and everything would be fine.

He glanced down, and stopped that line of thought in its tracks, peering at the screen under his hands. Hmm. He must have been more caught up in working himself out of the mode than he’d thought if he was typing out equations without thinking about it.

He must have _really_ been out of it, if he’d typed _that_ equation. It was a simple, smaller part of the first stages of research he done into his time machine, and he remembered it well, the rush of exhilaration sending him spinning around the slave camp, laughing and running, even with his collar on, until everyone had noticed and took him back on mode before the guards took action. Even if it turned out that the set of numbers was worthless in the end, he still looked back on that moment with pride. As nice as it was to remember that, having that particular piece of math set loose on the world would not be crash. He deleted it and the file it was on, and got back to work.

This time he kept focused, even if the information was just endless accounts of crimes, most of them not even recent. As far as he could tell, there’d been a spike of activity just before the Team discovered the pattern, and the activity had continued thereafter, but hadn’t increased or decreased in intensity or volume. Eventually, he deleted the last files about a string of bank robberies in Bangladesh and passed his time waiting for everyone else to finish going through what Nasa was doing out of the public eye. Justice League security levels could get him into some very nice places.

“Is everyone finished?” Despite not being the leader of the League, Batman inevitably got to take the lead on investigative work, with Red Robin following a close second and the other Batchildren being well-respected.

“I’ll show you what I’ve got left.” Hawkman said, wing feathers tipping a little as he talked in some avian gesture that Bart couldn’t understand. “Not much, but it’ll go faster with you looking over my shoulder.”

Heroes in the room who had finished with their assigned information gathered up in the centre, Zatanna helpfully pulling up a huge screen for the centralized information they’d gathered. It didn’t take long before the others were done too, and Bart stood next to the Martian Manhunter as J’onn shifted his height to see over Guardian.

Red Robin uploaded the combined efforts of everyone present, and Batman took the centre stage. “If at any time you have suggestions or comments,” he started, “speak up. This is what we know so far.

“There’s a pattern in the data. While at first whoever is behind all this was trying to keep it quiet, the steep rise in incidences just before it came to the Team’s attention means that either the puppeteer is entering an endgame, or he or she does not fear a League response.”

“That is indeed troubling,” J’onn spoke up. “However, I, for one, was under the impression that this had already been declared something started by the Light?”

“We don’t know that. All signs point to them, but we’ve been wrong before.” Batman nodded. “It’s better to explore all options before discounting anything.”

“Each one of the crimes has not been against any legitimate target or place, but against, for lack of a better word, other criminals. Gangs, smuggling rings, a prostitution people smuggling route in China was hit, all sorts of places that see a heavy amount of traffic in the criminal world. Now they’re all suddenly the targets of Supervillains.”

“This would indicate that the villains in question are trying to incite gang warfare, on a massive scale.” It wasn’t a question, but it was getting there, Red Robin’s tone hesitant. “Unfortunately, we don’t know how to stop that. Or, for that matter, why the Light or whoever’s behind this would want to create such chaos. As far as we can tell, it doesn’t benefit them either.”

“Employment records were in my set of data,” Kaldur added in. “There is not enough evidence to bring her to trial, but Queen Bee is the person funding all of this. However, Bialya might indeed come under negative economic effects from her actions, as criminal organizations thrive there, producing crops exported to the rest of the world while she turns a blind eye.”

“Doesn’t make sense for her to be messing that up then.” Guardian noted.

“No. But for the Light’s original goals, namely to make the human race ‘see the Light’ and advance and evolve rapidly through anarchy, mass criminal warfare between fractions would be perfect.” Zatanna pointed out.

“A workable theory.” Zatanna gifted her ex-boyfriend with a smile at his comment. Nightwing smiled back at her, and flicked a finger at the screen, bringing up a file. “As you can see, there has to be an end goal. Hiring supervillains doesn’t come cheap.”

“What I think we should be focusing on is how to stop it.” Hawkman said decisively.

“No, we need to find out the why behind this.”

“Cut it off at the root.” Some else said.

“Go after Queen Bee’s money and stopitlikethat?” Bart suggested.

“Wouldn’t work, the-“

“No actually we could-“

“And if we didn’t-“

“We should really be concerned about-“

“The Light-“

“It might not be them, we have to-“

Bart watched as the room rapidly descended into argument, and reflected that this was the downside of having a bunch of strong willed people used to getting their way in a room together. Then the Martian Manhunter said something completely wrong, and he leapt in to correct him, voice joining the fray.

*

“This is Kid Flash. Target acquired, I’m staying close, and I sound like an actor in CSI or MIG or NICIS or CBI or-“

“Yep, got it. You won’t have any trouble?”

“It’s only a car.” Bart scoffed, weaving through shrubbery over off the side of the road. That, together with the muting of his usual red and yellow to stealth colours, would hopefully keep the car’s occupants from noticing their shadow. It made it nearly impossible to see as night fell, but his goggles were fitted with enough goodies to help him on his way.

“Dude, we’re tracking you from the supercycle, that thing’s breaking the speed limit so bad I don’t think the cops could keep up!”

“They couldn’t, Static, remember?” Superboy broke in. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Why do people do this sort of stuff anyway?” Bart wondered aloud. “Grab a gun, rob three banks and steal a fast car. A great afternoon’s fun, but it’s going to put the rest of his life on mode.”

“Or her. Hers are dangerous too.” Static pointed out, “’Specailly because they don’t drop if you hit them in the balls.”

“Girls don’t have balls.” Superboy grunted.

“My point exactly.”

“Hey, guys? Am I going to keep running after this thing until it runs out of petrol, or are we going to stop it?” Bart asked, keeping the speeding vehicle in sight.

“Yeah, we’re on it. Static, get more stuff, this roadblock needs to be thick.”

“Kay.”

“Do we report this back to the Watchtower?” The speedster asked, avoiding a thorny path of ground.

“No, they’ve got bigger things to worry about. Virgil, you think that’s enough?”

“We should be good, man.”

“Great. Bart, stay out of sight. Don’t want you to panic the person behind the wheel and get them to speed up even more.”

“I’m not sure the car even _can_ speed up much more.” Bart assessed it, listening to the howl of the engine. “Virgil, you know stuff about cars, right?”

“More than you, I’d imagine.”

“What’s the sort with a little ‘s’ shape stamp on it? And it’s white.”

“Bart, cars come in heaps of different colours. Telling me it’s white won’t help.”

“Well I wouldn’t know! Do I look like I’d ever need a car? Nasty, slow, stinking things.”

“Oi!”

“You two shut up, will you? Sphere says that the car should see the roadblock after the next bend. Be ready.” The communicator shut out with a click as Superboy grunted, probably lifting something up.

“Right.”

“Crash.”

The car skidded round the last corner, and Bart burst from cover, catching up to it. Almost immediately, he could tell something was wrong. The driver, seeing the roadblock, looking understandably terrified, but beyond that, the young man’s eyes were dilated and thick with his pupils black, far beyond what a normal human should’ve looked like. It happened fast, even by his standards. The car swerved, and accelerated hard as a foot was slammed down onto the wrong pedal, the glare from Sphere’s lamps blinding as the vehicle ricocheted toward a construction of rock and bush spread across the road. There was no gap, no spot left to slip through and avoid harm.

Bart accelerated far beyond what the metal box was capable of. It was too late for the machine. The idiot driving it might still be saved. He wrenched the door opened and torn him out, thudding a hand against the seatbelt in quick vibration to break the mechanism and rescue the human. Frozen mid yell, the muscles stiff and resistant, he caught the man and skidded to a halt just out of the blast radius of what had, from what he could guess, been a _very_ expensive car.

For a second there was only the boom and crackle of the flames illuminating the night, the crashing creaking groan as thousands upon thousands of dollars of engineering found its end, the shrieking wail of the man in his arms, who he let thump to the ground without ceremony.

“SHIT!” Static appeared in a blur of electricity, flinging aside pieces of smothering rubble.

“Dude, down here!” Bart yelled over the crackle of flames. “Get away from that, the petrol’s gunna ignite, leave it to Superboy!”

“But there’s a guy! -Oh. Wait, you got him out?”

“I gothimout.” Bart confirmed, shoving at the snivelling heap on the ground with his booted toe. “He’s still human, even if he is a dick.”

“And an idiot.” Superboy hit the ground, making his normal impact and leaving road works for someone else to clean up. “And, finally _arrested._ ”

“Um, is he okay?” Static hovered to the ground beside him. “Cause… he looks-“

“Like he should be sent to Arkham Asylam, not Belle Rave?” Bart suggested.

“He won’t be going to either.” Superboy pulled the man up by his arm, and he hung there, limp and gibbering. “He’s headed to the courts, to be tried on stealing, threatening people with a gun, grand-theft auto-“

“Isn’t that avideogame?” Bart said, confused.

“No, seriously people, he don’t look so good.” Static hopped off his metal thing and came closer, holding up the man’s head. “His eyes are nuts, and…” he shifted his fingers to find a pulse, “heartbeat’s gone wild.”

“Joker venom?” Bart asked.

“Druggie.” Superboy snorted. “Not everything in the world happens because of supervillains.”

“Yes, sometimes you just get horrible, despicable human beings who tear down other people and build a living from their addiction for no good reason.” Bart agreed cheerily. “Very moding.”

“Don’t sound happy about it.” Static elbowed him.

He put his arms out in a placating gesture. “Fine, fine, but would it actually help them to be sad about it? What’s the point in worrying about things beyond your control? Either get the control and crash the mode, or don’t worry about it.”

Superboy frowned at them both. “Is this really the place to be discussing philosophy? Come on. Sphere’ll be able to send a message to the police and tell them about the crash. We can drop this village idiot off in a cell and head home.”

“I’ll run.” Bart excused himself. “I need to stretch my legs, anyway.”

“And you aren’t the world’s biggest fan of flying.” Static smirked.

“Shut up. Do I really need to recount the first time we took you out in the supercycle?”

“I’m never living that down.”

“No. No you aren’t.”

“Are you two going to help me strap this guy in, or do I have to do it myself?” Superboy made another attempt to stop the banter.

Bart and Virgil grinned. Given a subject and the inclusion of Cassie, La’gaan, and-slash-or Jaime, an upper time limit for the banter that the younger members of the Team treated like a recreational sport hadn’t yet been found. Sometimes the older and theoretically more responsible Team members put a stop to it and buckled down on the work they were doing, sometimes it became a free for all, snark and sarcasm applied in liberal doses. It depended on the day. Despite not joining in often, when he did Superboy was a laugh, all blunt and sharp at the same time. However, it didn’t look like he wanted to play that day.

Static hopped into the Supercycle and gave her an affectionate pat. She beeped, and the straps around the would-be-criminal tightened accordingly, making sure the man wouldn’t fall out and also preventing any escape attempts he might come up with. Not that there were very many escape attempts one could put into play soaring several thousand feet off the ground. Virgil’s metal plate thingy got tucked away in a pouch on the side of the cycle, and Superboy clambered up into the pilot’s seat, ready to fly.

“You sure you wanna run, Kid Flash?” He asked, revving the engine. Bart politely didn’t point out that the Supercycle’s tech was from New Genesis, so revving it was less than useless.

“Nah,” he shook his head, and a chip of rock fell out, “I’m good. Running’s fun.”

“So says you. I still think it was invented as a torture devise from P.E teachers.” Virgil grumbled.

“I’ll see you when I see you then.” Superboy reached down and flicked the quietening druggie, starting his squawking back up. “We have to drop this off at the nearest police station.”

“See ya,” Bart agreed.

The cycle rose into the air, hovering as its engines adjusted themselves before moving away, flying into the sky until it was at a distance where it looked like it was floating, not soaring. Bart watched them for a couple seconds, and then turned his attention to the roadblock. While the flaming wreckage was impressive, it was also dangerous. He circled the structure; sucking off the oxygen and watching the night die back down into muted colours and shapes as the fire collapsed in on itself.

When he was finished there were still a few embers, scattered about and resting on the odd bit of foliage that had gotten pressed in with the rock to make the roadblock, but most of it was out. Nearly all of the petrol had combusted, burning itself out with frantic enthusiasm. If any reignited after he was gone, it wouldn’t be his fault. Then he ducked around the edge of the blockade, and dialled up the night vision on his goggles. Now that there wasn’t any speeding lights or flashing explosions to deal with, he really could see much better with them more light sensitive. The enhanced vision and the flat, smooth surface of the tarmac meant that he was smiling as he started to run.

He didn’t know what it was like for Barry, or what it had been like for Jay and Wally. Wally and Jay had been slower, had needed to accelerate and decelerate like he didn’t have to, and Barry was just a different person. To Bart, however, running was freedom. Sprinting was pushing himself, feeling the burn in his legs and the breath catching in his lungs, relishing his own speed and the strength that it gave him. This wasn’t sprinting. This was travelling, relaxing and endless.

The steady skipping beat of his feet on the tarmac wasn’t something he could hear. Past the speed of sound the electronics in his communicator still worked fine, but the noises coming out and into it were lost to the speed. It was the same for every other bit of din that the world usually surrounded him with. Past the sound barrier, and all noise ceased. He couldn’t hear himself pant, he couldn’t hear the wind or the sound of his passage, he couldn’t hear a bullet as it was shot toward him. Without sound, the world started to feel lonely, devoid of other life even as he ran past a rodent paused in the middle of the road, its nose up and stopped halfway through a twitch.

It was lonely, but it was also the closest he ever came to being peaceful, and still. Ironic that he should feel that way while moving faster than most people could blink, but that was how he was. Kid Flash was always thinking, planning a joke or a retort or a way to rescue seven hostages without anyone shooting someone else. Always fidgeting, never patient, drumming out rhythms and braiding flowers and crafting drawings, sketching lines on paper. But here, running, with his mind focused only on that, with the feeling as his feet hit tarmac, over and over again as a steady beat, this was peaceful. This was calm, and safe, unconstrained and free.

It was endless new places, a world that he’d never see all of, not even if he ran his fastest. It was being untouchable, less than tangible, passing through walls and buildings and cars as a city blurred past, showing short glimpses into the lives of the people who lived there. It was the freedom to go wherever he pleased, whenever it suited him, however he wanted, a club in Mexico with a friend or a tavern in Ireland or friendly penguins in Antarctica or the Amazon jungle and a village still unscathed by the hands of outsiders.

It was _crash_.

A flash of light interrupted him, and Bart turned back, curious but confused. At the speed he was going, slowly accelerating from twice the speed of sound, nothing should _flash._ Except for him. God, would his grandfather have been proud of him. Apparently bad puns were contagious. But yes, nothing should have flashed, not like that. Light bulbs flickered, but those were weak, and came up differently on the goggles he wore. Searchlights were bright and loud, but they were made of better stuff than the bulbs people put in their homes. They didn’t flicker.

It was less of a flicker, he decided, and more of a pulse, with a radius that was distinctly mechanical. He could see it over the roofs of the trailer park the light was in, and he darted closer, slowing down to get a better look.

The area the light was coming from was open, a barbeque made of bricks and flimsy rotting seating showing a centre area probably meant for gatherings that had long gone to waste. That didn’t matter to him. As soon as he ducked out from behind the trailers, now slower than the speed of sound, Kid Flash knew what the light had come from. A boom tube. An open boom tube, spilling people into what should have been an uneventful corner of the town. Hooded, masked, black clothed people. He recognised the uniform. He’d worn it once, and once only, invading the summit between the Light and the Reach, pretending to be one of Ra’s al Gual’s men.

Assassins. Here? There was no time to question it. The men and women of the League of Shadows struck first, and explained why later. With five of them already through the Boom tube, and a sixth, Black Spider probably here to lead the mission, almost out of the passageway, he attacked. The first fell, in almost slow motion, and a second crumpled on top. A female lashed out, but in the wrong direction, and he grabbed her arm and twisted, using his own momentum to dislocate her shoulder and spin her to the ground. The fourth was reaching for a blade when Kid Flash caught him, and the henchman got a brutal knee to the head to knock him out before being thrown over the half rotten seating of the courtyard.

Their reaction time was impressive. He was hit by the last faceless goon with a hard elbow, missing his ribs but slamming into his stomach painfully. The flinch from that was enough to give the leader of the little gang his opportunity. Black Spider shot webbing at him, and Kid Flash ducked into a roll to dodge it. A light came on in one of the trailers nearby, and someone started shouting. He tried to move, to leap toward the last masked and nameless goon, but something tugged at his foot.

Webbing, red and thick, had caught the tip of one of his boots. Black Spider lined up to take another shot, and Bart snarled to himself under his breath, shaking his boot and speeding up, trying to get free. It worked, and he shot forward, but the motion was too uncontrolled, and in exactly the wrong direction. The goon was ready for him and swung a heavy metal pole at him, hitting the teenager and knocking his speed off him as he staggered. The next webbing didn’t miss as the first had. It caught the speedster’s legs, and he tripped, catching himself on his hands before his head smacked into the ground.

Something hit his neck, from a direction he hadn’t been expecting. It couldn’t have come from either Black Spider or the goon still standing, and Bart whirled, looking for the unknown foe. Webbing wouldn’t hold him. He vibrated, phasing out of it, and lashed out with a low kick that Black Canary had spent months teaching him, taking the last goon to the floor. Getting back up, Kid Flash knocked the goon’s head against the floor, making sure he was out cold before turning his attention to the last two enemies.

At least he knew Black Spider’s location. He left the other, unseen opponent for last. Kid Flash sped up and time slowed down around him as Bart planted two fists into the masked man’s torso in quick succession, winding him and leaving him helpless for a few seconds. A few seconds was all he should need. He got in a kick to Black Spider’s head, but missed the next as the criminal ducked. A handhold on his leg upset him and threw him to the ground, and why didn’t that work, he’d had enough time for that to work, but he rolled over and got up again.

Something was wrong. The world shouldn’t sway, and the night vision in his goggles was supposed to stop the lights spilling from cheap curtains in the trailers from blinding him. Black Spider hit him again, and he staggered, feeling nauseated. There was definitely something wrong, and he had a feeling that if he could peel back that mask, Back Spider would be smiling. This wasn’t a fight. He was being trapped, Bart knew with the instinctive paranoia of a rabid, shy animal. He turned to run.

A blade filled his vision, elongating and twisting without complying with physics, and the flat of it hit him, knocking his head and putting a bruise on one side of his cheekbone as the other side impacted with the dirt. His vision swam, his muscles locked up, and his stomach turned over again, bile rising up his throat as he blinked, each flicker of his eyes lasting longer than the others.

It shouldn’t have surprised him, but it did. The last thing he saw was Black Spider bowing to a figure with white hair, black armour, and an orange mask, a sword hanging by its side.


	8. Part 7

Either he’d gotten very, very drunk the previous night, or he’d been drugged. Sighing and shaking his head, Bart very quickly decided not to do that again and swallowed down the vomit he could feel rising up his throat.

Unfortunately, it took several litres of vodka before he even got tipsy, and any effect he got only lasted an hour, maybe less as his accelerated metabolism burnt it off. So the second option was looking more and more likely. With his eyes still shut (and even that still too bright), he felt around the underside of his jaw, and received confirmation in a tiny dot of clotted blood near the joining between cheekbone and head.

Getting caught by Black Spider’s web. That was the only time he’d have been slow enough to shoot at, and either indicated a really lucky shot from someone who just happened to be carrying enough tranquilizer to fell an elephant, or that they’d come prepared. Specifically, come prepared for him, because just as alcohol wore off, so did the sleeping drugs supervillains caught heroes with. He’d saved his teammate’s asses many a time because he woke up far quicker and more alert than anyone expected. To knock him out for who knows how long needed stuff that was more poison than anaesthetic.

With his eyes still telling him that his eyelids were insufficient and that he was in danger of being blinded, he used his other senses. The ground underneath him was spongy, and gave way under his fingers, but under that was a hard surface. So they’d probably put him on a mattress, a bad one. That meant he was in a proper cell, not just locked in a cellar, and made it that much more complicated to escape. He couldn’t smell anything, other than clean sanitized floors, and there weren’t any sound of other prisoners either.

His communicator was gone, ripped from his ear and leaving holes where the stylized lightning bolts usually angled up. His goggles were still with him, and Bart flipped them down to let him see, giving his eyes time to adjust to the filtered light. Feeling along his gloves, the pouches there were untouched, and he took a protein bar from the store there, silently praising the first Kid Flash’s foresight. The thing tasted like crap, but it gave him an energy boast that he’d surely need to get out and away. Going from how hungry he was, he’d been out for at least twelve hours, but it could have easily been longer than that.

His exploration by touch finished when he reached up and froze, fingers on the outline of the collar around his neck.

Thick. Metal, with indentations that he knew, he just _knew_ contained flashing lights. It sat snugly round his shoulders, and he’d thought he’d escaped it a long time ago. An inhibitor collar. The list of people who had the authority to get one numbered in the hundreds on a planet with more than seven billion souls on its surface.

And now one was snapped around his neck. Just to test that, hey, it wasn’t all a prank by the Team, or a different, harmless sort of metal band around his neck, Bart jerked his arm. It swung fast, but nowhere near as fast as it should have. Normal, human, panicky fast, the sort of fast that anyone could move at when they were being flooded with adrenaline and rising worry. Not speedster fast. Putting that much effort into flicking his hand, that should have made a wave of air; he should have felt that, he should have heard it. Bart quashed the panic as he struggled for control, struggled not to seem like he was struggling. He was cut off. He was on mode.

Finally, keeping a tight rein on his emotions, he opened his eyes beneath his goggles. The room he’d been placed in was a grey windowless box, clean but colourless, with a door set with iron bars and an open arch leading into a bathroom, toilet sink and mirror all bolted down. Switching between infrared, night vision and every other type available to him on his goggles didn’t tell him anything new. Carefully Bart sat up and swung his feet onto the floor, sitting quietly as he waited for the drug to fade and his captors to show themselves.

He needed a distraction. What had he been up to? The eighty second one in the sequence. He rapped his hand against the metal surface of the cell’s bed. Six-one-three-zero-five-seven-nine-zero-seven-two-one-six-one-one-five-nine-one. Eighty three. Nine-nine-one-nine-four-eight-five-three-zero-nine-four-seven-five-five-four-nine-seven. Eighty four. One-six-zero-five…

With no way of measuring time, Bart didn’t know how long it was before he heard footsteps, a steady beat echoing down the halls until they came to a stop, right outside his door.  Knowing it was hopeless but trying it any way, he positioned himself behind the opening, and waited for an opportunity.

Opportunity never came. The door slammed outwards, handle hitting his ribs, and he doubled over coughing. “Good try.” Deathstroke said humourlessly. “But not good enough.”

“It… you….” He managed.

“The one who shot you full of that lovely sedative? Or the one who snapped that collar around your skinny neck?” The thug shrugged, a fluid movement betraying just how much control he had over his own actions. “Both, of course, would be correct. You should be more careful, boy. Even a speedster must stop running eventually.”

“Black… Spider.” Bart was slowly getting his breath back.

“On loan from Ra’s al Ghul, along with the untested idiots making up his entourage. Allies are useful, yes?” Deathstroke still stood in the doorway, expectantly.

“What do you want?” Bart gritted his teeth, and hauled himself back onto his feet.

“You will follow me. I could not care less about you, understandably, but my employers have questions that only you can answer. That’s why you were brought here.”

“You’re… awfully talkative.”

“And you,” he smiled, showing far too many teeth, “aren’t. What’s wrong, _Kid Flash_ , not so many quips and jokes around you, now that you’re as slow as the next man?”

Bart glowered at him, but couldn’t find a retort, which he supposed made Deathstroke right.

“Come now.” He held open the door, and Bart tried not to pull away from it. “You can either walk along in front of me, like a good boy, or I can drag you along the floor like a disobedient mongrel. I know that the second would be better for your ego, but frankly I think the first would be better for your ribs.”

He thought about it. Even if he put up a fuss, Bart wasn’t a fantastic fighter without speed, no matter how many classes Black Canary put him through. Against an ordinary criminal, no trouble. Against Deathstroke? He was moded.

Going along with what they wanted, he knew, would make them more likely to keep talking, more likely to give him something to strike back at them with. And, as his jailer had said, would be better for a body suddenly cut off from superspeed-healing and unused to the pain. Unused to it, but quickly remembering it and compartmentalizing, forced back into old habits of relying on human adrenaline and ingenuity. Bart was on autopilot, pretty much, trying to cut off what he was feeling and just deal with it. It wasn’t working, but it was the only thing he had.

“Well, boy?”

Bart realised he’d been silent for too long, and dropped his head in sullen submission. “I’m coming.”

“Good lad.” The tone was almost friendly, had it not come from the person who’d put the inhibitor collar around his neck. “Follow me now. And remember, if you try anything…”

The threat was left unsaid.

Really, if a threat was left unsaid, it wasn’t that threatening. Bart didn’t think Deathstroke was used to keeping prisoners, which made sense. He was the Light’s enforcer, not their slave driver, and anyone who was captured usually ended up with Ra’s al Ghul or in a pod. While that meant that he’d have a better chance of straight out escaping, or getting enough alone time to do so, it also worried him. Because if this was out of the ordinary, then… well, it was out of the ordinary. A pattern broken, like Red Robin always said, was just as worthy of investigation as a pattern made. Not that he really understood detective work.

The conflicting debate in his head distracted him as he followed the white ponytail down the hallways, and, too late, Bart realised that he should have paid attention to the route. Crap. He tried to make up for lost time by peering at his surroundings from under his bowed head. The walls were plain and unassuming, not telling him anything, and the doors set into them were just as uninformative. From the lack of windows not just in his cell but everywhere, he guessed that they were underground, but it was hard to tell. The air was slightly cloying and humid, with a stale edge to it that suggested it was recycled. Recycled air meant that even if the vents were big enough to climb into, they wouldn’t lead outside, but that was the only thing he could guess from his observation.

Deathstroke came to a halt and Bart jolted, almost but not quite touching him as the lack of his powers made itself known in an inability to decelerate properly. The enforcer opened a door to his left, and gestured for Bart to go through. Inside was an office. Not one with creatures in tanks in the walls, or a glowing liquid dripping from the roof, or any of a thousand other clichés, but an office, with a computer on a desk with a chair behind it, and a couch lined up on one wall. Hesitantly, he sat down on the couch, as Deathstroke shut the door and stood in front of it, feet at shoulder width and hands by his sides in perfect parade rest.

They weren’t going anywhere. Bart tried to look scared, and hoped that all the practise in lying he’d gotten translated to a facial expression that wasn’t constipated. Without anything better to do, and getting increasingly annoyed at how boring the world was at normal speed, he took a look round the room again.

The computer was newer than it appeared. That was the first thing he noticed, the way that the casing slipped on too big over something else inside. What the innards were, he couldn’t say, but if they’d gone to the trouble of putting a casing around the computer to make it look older and slower, then it had to be less simple than it appeared. The desk, too. A thin band of metal in the wood of it, he didn’t know what that was for, but he’d seen a couple of bits of furniture like that on raids, sneaking into warlords’ houses for information to bring them to trial in regions rife with humanitarian crimes. The chair just looked like a chair, made of leather and expensive-looking. On the walls a couple of old paintings hung, and while they were impressive, they didn’t exactly complement the beige walls.

Expensive stuff, old stuff, and stuff that belonged in a warzone. Whatever was under the hood of the computer had to have cost some serious cash too. It all looked like the place was someone’s actual office, someone important enough to keep Deathstroke waiting like an unremarkable goon, but Bart thought it was probably a temporary arrangement. Important people in high up places had offices filled with books that they never read and perpetual motions toys that swung annoyingly until you put in the effort to stop them (he was aware that as a somewhat perpetually in motion object himself, that was hypocritical). This was a place without floor to ceiling windows (or any windows at all) in a small space, with beige walls that didn’t match the décor. The only personal touch was the paintings, and even then, they resisted all attempts at a colour scheme to hang on the wall, colours washed out with the lighting.

Even without superspeed and taking the time to examine every part of the room he could see, Bart was still left waiting for a long time before the person for which he was intended entered the office and took his place in the leather chair, waving Deathstroke off when he stepped forward. “Good afternoon, Kid Flash.”

Vandal Savage. _Fuck_.

Deathstroke prodded at him with the flat of a blade.  Apparently he was expected to respond. “Um… hi?”

“Do you like our facilities?” The immortal asked, as though they were having tea together.

“Oh, sure, yeah, swell.” He replied automatically. “I just love how hard your door handles are.”

Vandal looked at Deathstroke, question clear. “The boy tried to hide behind the door of his cell. Oldest trick in the book. I swung it into him. No permanent damage.”

“Ah, Deathstroke. That’s no way to treat a guest, is it?”

“A guest? Can we not, really? I’m not a guest here, you’ve captured me. In a pre-planned and well executed attack, too, so it wasn’t like you saw an opportunity to snatch me and took it. What do you want?” Bart reflected that maybe self-preservation and a brain to mouth filter would be a good thing to work on. He was, at this point, almost pre-programmed to banter with villains or his teammates when the opportunity arose, but this? Not the right situation.

“What do I want?” If anything, Savage looked amused. Which Bart supposed was better than homicidal. “I want a great many things, young one. But it is true that we need you for one of the things I want most, at present.”

“I’m not doing anything for you.” He crossed his arms, and tried not to think about the way that it made him feel more safe and more like a petulant child all at once.

“Information. That is what we have you here for. And I must admit it has not been easy work bringing you here.” Everyone was speaking to him gently, like he was a child, like he’d be swayed if the bad men talked to him in a soft voice. “A pity, that you gave up your little job delivering goods to all of your friends. It would have been so easy catching you there, when we knew where you were going and what you were carrying, but no. We had to wait. Why did you suddenly stop doing that?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Not really. It isn’t of interest to me. I’m simply making polite conversation.”

“Polite. With a boy in a collar.” He glared, the metal round his throat feeling heavier.

“Well, if you didn’t have that, we all know that you’d already be gone by now.” An easy shrug of weighty shoulders. “A precaution, that’s all. Once you give us what we want, Impulse, you will be free to go.”

Bart put aside the ominous last part of that. “I don’t go by Impulse anymore.”

“I know.” Again with a slight smile. He was being treated like a stray dog. Feed him enough scraps of kindness and they thought they’d earn his loyalty. “But you must forgive me. I am used to speaking to another Kid Flash; I had more of a… history, if you will, with him.”

“You killed him.”

“I did not. We never intended for the Reach to get so far, so quickly. The three beetles tipped the scales in their favour, and we were forced to rapidly change our plans.” Bart didn’t think any of that was a lie, but it was trying to paint a picture he knew had never been real.

“You killed him.” He repeated.

Vandal lifted his shoulders again, and Bart thought that action should be far more difficult, with the weight of all everyone he’d murdered hanging over him, but the motion was well practised and unconscious. “How is your grandfather?”

“My grandfather?” The sudden change of topic was hard to keep up with. He felt like Savage was searching for a crack in his armour, a way to pry him open and learn something.

“Yes. The Flash.”

“He’s perfect. Stellar. Couldn’t be better, thank you for the concern.”

“It is interesting, isn’t it?” Vandal started typing, and pulled up something on the computer. He twisted it around to show Kid Flash, and Bart frowned in confusion. It was the public file of him, basic information and age and likes and dislikes that anyone without the slightest bit of security clearance could view, a picture of him that Miss Martian had taken for it, smiling and running. “Your little biography.”

“Not really.” He said, honestly confused. “The picture was hard to take, though. Miss M had to levitate me up so it looked like I was running real fast, but so I didn’t actually break the sound barrier or go too fast for her camera or anything.”

“Fascinating.” The tone was still too light, too cheerful and friendly for it to be good. “Did you here that, Deathstroke? We now know why there aren’t any good pictures of this handsome young fellow all over the internet. If only every celebrity could escape the press that way.”

“ _Fascinating_.” Deathstroke echoed sarcastically.

“However, young Flash, I was talking more about…” he pressed a finger to the box of random information underneath a description of his hobbies, “that. Your favourite colour is sky blue. You like to paint in your free time. The best prank you have ever pulled involved vibrating through a wall. You hate writing essays. You are the second Flash’s grandson.”

Bart sat silently, waiting for the monologue to get to its point.

“You are the _second_ Flash’s grandson. How… miraculous, really, when the second Flash himself is only in his mid-forties. He must have fathered his first child when he was your age.” Bart felt like a fly, trapping under a pressing, crushing, pinning gaze. “But we know that he has not.

“You Flashes have always been… rather lax in hiding your identities. Whereas Batman and his brats are a mystery, almost every criminal who passes through Central City knows precisely who you are. Because of your wonderful speed, that does not matter. You can defend your home, and the press conveniently ignores who you are, and everyone is happy. We know who the Flash is, but we cannot touch him in his own home. It is frustrating, but it is not new. We have always known. Then, four and a bit years ago, you turn up. You have an excessive level of speed, just as much as the current Flash, far exceeding the pitiful efforts of the first Kid Flash and the first Flash, and you have your own costume, and name. Impulse. Very cute. You are accepted instantly, and even start living with the old first Flash and his wife. You come out of nowhere. There are no records, no sighting, no explanations about where you came from, or why you have your powers.

“So, the question becomes, _Bart Allen_ , who are you?” Vandal smiled, looking down to where Bart’s fingers clutched at the couch cushions, leaving imprints in the foam as he twitched. “You have drawn our attention.”

“I’m not attention worthy.”

“That has to be the first time I’ve ever heard someone from your family say that.” The smile because wider, more akin to an ape baring its teeth than an expression of kindness. “It’s alright, my dear boy. We know.” They _knew_.

He made a huge effort to keep the insurmountable, rising fear from showing on his face. “Know what?”

“You see this, Kid Flash?” Savage swept an arm out, gesturing to everything in front of him in a large, expansive movement. “We are underground, here, far enough from the League’s instruments and your Watchtower’s sensors to do whatever we wish. The generosity of Mr Luther has provided us with a good number of scientists, to help the Brain with his work. The previous occupants of the island are helping by continuing their work over our heads, shipping out drugs and bringing in our supplies for us with Black Manta. Ra’s al Ghul has some of his best people guarding the ways in and out. It is a team effort, of course, but rest assured, Mr Allen, we are getting close.”

“To what?” His throat was dry.

Vandal Savage’s eyes gleamed, and the immortal suddenly looked both mad and inspired, every inch the villain who had brought the Light together, the mastermind of their plans. “To time travel.”

The world slowed down.

Or it seemed to. He knew his powers hadn’t returned, he knew that it was just the adrenaline, flooding his system, readying him for fight or flight, but Bart couldn’t think. He forced himself to laugh. “Time travel doesn’t exist. N-not outside of Hollywood.”

“Ah, but we both know it does, don’t we? You are our proof. You always bothered the Light, you know. A stranger, a new figure to factor into our calculations, but it’s more than that, isn’t it? You, Impulse, are an impossible child. Sent back to this miserable time to change the future, by who knows what sort of person built the time machine. Impossible… and wonderful,” he breathed, voice still hopelessly gentle.

“N-no, you are-“

“Wrong?” Savage snorted, grinning. “We wouldn’t have kidnapped you if we were wrong; your reaction here just cements it, if anything. And you are going to tell us how it was done.”

“N-“

“Before you protest,” the smile died away and Savage held up his hand, “I have a number of threats to get through. Procedure, you know. We can, and will, torture you, although it isn’t a very reliable way to get information. Those in pain will say anything to get it to stop. We can starve you, or refuse to give you water, or try to find a way to insert that collar into your neck permanently, I’m sure the Brain would have a happy time with that. He’s a little morbid. But Mr Allen, before we start on all that physical torture, I want you to think.” He leant forward, resting his elbows on the desk and clasping his hands in front of him. “One hundred and two is quite old, isn’t it?”

All his movement, his shaking and fidgeting and the nervous panicked darting glances, stopped.

“Not that old for me,” Vandal continued, “but for a mortal, quite ancient. How is he, do you think? Would Jay Garrick still be able to run, still be able to defend his wife if we came for her? Your guardians are not as strong as they once were. They have protectors, but their protectors protect many other things besides them. What do you think it would take?” His voice dropped to a whisper, and it was still so _kind_ , soft and gentle and seeping poison. “What would we have to do?”

No. No, they couldn’t, even they wouldn’t, the League would destroy them, they couldn’t-

“Send Klarion to destroy Bejing? Ra’s men to threaten Iris Allen and her children, so that even the mighty Flash would not be fast enough? What would we do? Two bullets, or slower? Taking them back here, putting them in a cell beside yours so that you can watch both of them waste away and die here. Break their bones, such fragile things when you’re old. Feed them and prolong the agony, or let them starve? Subject them to the torture meant for you, perhaps, would they last long?”

He started shaking, and for a moment, drawing up his knees to hug them to his chest in a futile barrier against the words, he was nine years old again, and there was screaming, so much screaming as the children were taken from their parents, shots and bullets and he, him falling, sacrifice and blood and his mother screaming and being torn away from him, the body on the ground that didn’t twitch, the boy next to him, a boy who’d held him and comforted him and Bart had cried into his shirt and what was his name, the boy’s name? There wasn’t enough air, he needed more he need to go faster he couldn’t _breathe_ , had to get more air he’d known the boy’s name, he’d been told it but he couldn’t remember it and that suddenly seemed the most important thing in the world, the boy just like him who hadn’t survived was _meat_ , _failure_ , death, stabbing, _dead_.

“…he's had enough.” Someone said from a great distance. “Take him away.”

“Are you sure?” Someone else asked as he was hauled roughly to his feet, swaying and searching for balance as the world travelled further and further out of his reach. “You could-“

“There’s no rush.” The voice sounded happy. “We have all the time in the world.”


	9. Part 8

This time the light didn’t hurt him. He woke up, scrabbling his way back to consciousness edged with panic, just in time to freeze, and take stock of where he was. Bart’s goggles still covered his eyes. His ears were still exposed, and felt naked without the comforting weight of the communicator covering them. It was one thing to remove the devices himself, take the innards out and drop them into sewage, keeping the lightning bolts his family wore still fastened on outside. It was quite another thing to have them ripped out, wires and course metal scraping over his earlobes, the red lightning bolts Kid Flash wore gone with the rest of it.

Most of his body hurt, one way or another. He bruised just as easily as the next person, but he wasn’t used to having them last, wasn’t accustomed to having the mattress dig into sore spots that should have vanished within seconds. Muscles reported their complaints, and he forced the information they gave him away to be dealt with at a later date. Bart’s stomach felt completely empty, and his mouth didn’t seem to have any moisture in it all at. Going from that, he’d probably been out for at least another half day.

He shifted, sitting up on the side of the bed. A knock came from the door, a polite warning of an invasion that he wouldn’t be able to stop, and Deathstroke walked in, carrying a tray. “Must be hungry,” he commented. “Kids eat a lot.”

The tray was put on the floor. Carefully, broadcasting every movement, he reached for it, giving Deathstroke enough time to snatch it back and taunt him with its food and drink. Nothing happened. Taking that as permission, he swallowed down the container of stale water, and ate quickly. If nothing else he was remembering instincts he’d hadn’t had to use for years. Eat quickly, so no one could take it away from him. Liquid is precious, drink. When he’d finished, Bart put the bottle and  plastic container back on the tray, and shoved it away from the bed.

Deathstroke stopped it with the tip of one foot, bending down to pick it up. “How the mighty have fallen.” He said, in a fairly good mimicry of humour. “You don’t have any sarcasm now, do you boy? Good. We’ll all get along… so much better, if you learn your place.”

Bart stayed silent. Under the mask of skin and muscle and lips, where Deathstoke couldn’t see him, he gritted his teeth.

“I must admit, we thought that you’d be stronger, little hero. No? Not going to give me anything for that? Not a glare, no joke about it? Well that’s just disappointing. We didn’t know how far Vandal had cut, you see.” He waved a hand, gesturing at Bart. “So hard to tell how close you are to being broken, little thing, with those goggles on. Body language doesn’t tell us half as much as looking at your eyes. So take them off, there’s a good boy. Put them on the bed. No wearing them in here, or we’ll take them away entirely.”

He took them off, careful not to tangle the wires of the delicate gear with the shredded remnants of his communicator, and stared at the floor.

“Good. Hopefully, this time we won’t spark a panic attack from your delicate self.” The door was shut, and there was a beep from the other side as an electronic lock engaged.

Bart’s eyes darted up from the floor, and his lips twisted into a snarl. Panic attack. Him, a panic attack. He’d fallen for it, stupid, soft little boy that he was, taken in by their act, the way they were so kind. He’d thought he was less valuable. But no. They knew about the time travel, something that even the bloody fucking Batman hadn’t figured out, and now, now they were building their own machine, trying to bend _his_ creation into something for them. They were going to go back, and make sure the Reach thing worked out how _they_ wanted this time.

It would never work.

But this was already too far. In his head, Bart pulled himself back together, layered up armour. Vandal knew where to push now. Bart’s mistake, a big mistake Vandal knew where to push to make Bart talk. For his family, for them, he couldn’t let Jay or Joan be hurt. To lose another set of guardians, to lose more of his family, too much already, not fair, couldn’t lose more, had to fight them. His thoughts on the subject weren’t even coherent.

So find a different subject. Avoid thinking about that, set parameters, goals, and create a plan. Craft a world of lies that Savage would believe. Not even the mighty immortal knew that the time machine was Bart’s creation. That was an edge he couldn’t lose. Play to what they knew of him, play the child who joked around that had suddenly found himself in a serious place. Make them think the panic attack indicated something. Give them false expectations. Use the truth to make a lie. He could do this. He could twist their demands and lead them down dead ends. Stop their plan. Make them pay for the threat against the people he loved.

He ran a hand through his hair, and laughed when it came out clean. There should’ve been ash in the sky and dust on the ground. Then everything would’ve been the same, just about, collared and forced to work for the oppressors and invaders he hated.

He was Bart Allen. He was the grandson of the Flash; he was the person who upheld the legacy of Kid Flash. He was the child who had been stuck in a Reach pod and tortured, hurled through pain until they were happy and he was weaponized. He was the child who had been given all that power, and just as soon as he was given it, had it locked away under cold metal and blinking light. He was the child that endured that, and the hunger, and the suffering, and the separation, and he was the child that had changed it. Backed into a corner and given a choice between hopelessness and despair, he had fucking rebelled, he had torn his own path out of things that were impossible. He’d smashed the collar. He’d cured Neutron. As a thirteen year old slave, oppressed and beaten and so obviously broken, he’d looked into the eyes of the Reach, and torn their reality down, ripped their future to shreds. Savage thought the he could use Bart’s technology, undo everything both Kid Flashes had strived for? Fuck this. Fuck them.

Bart would make them regret this.

Keeping his eyes fixed blankly to the wall, hands held in terse stillness, the collared speedster focused and began to plan.

What he knew about his situation could either fill books or not take up a single sentence, depending on how he looked at it. There were a few easy, logical assumptions to make. The Light worked like a pack of wolves, nipping at their prey’s heels, always relentless, always together, with another wolf waiting to take the place of the lead one when that one got tired. If they did something this big, all of them were in on it. Savage had mentioned the Brain making the machine, Black Manta bringing in supplies, Lex Luther giving him scientists, Ra’s al Gual had sent the assassins, with Deathstroke, to bring him in, but the others hadn’t been talked about.

With the Light collecting themselves and undertaking a huge project, even going so far as to relocate Vandal Savage to an empty office to oversee it all, they clearly weren’t trying to incite mass criminal warfare. That wasn’t their goal. From there, it was a leap, but Bart thought that Klarion and Queen Bee were probably in charge of creating an effective, chaotic smokescreen to distract the League. The mass warfare wasn’t a goal, it was a cover up. To cover up this.

The shit that’d been stolen, that he’d had to replace when he was on delivery duty. Boxes of Radon, a pure element, and a noble gas, decayed from Uranium, one of the densest gases there was and radioactive. A potential power source, maybe. Particle accelerator parts, which was very, very worrying. An atomic clock, to measure any fluctuations in time. Not everything could be linked back to the Light’s project. Maybe he was drawing connections where there weren’t any.

But there was a math equations sitting on a deleted file in the Justice League’s computers that said differently.

Over half the Light’s members focused on one scheme, and the others busy creating small incidents and trouble worldwide, trouble that had spiked just before the Team had discovered it as they made their work more obvious. It wasn’t good. They’d made some mistakes. The League would catch on, sooner rather than later. But with Savage’s all-too effective threat hanging over his head Bart had to answer the questions that were put to him. The Light would get information. He just had to make sure it was either useless, wrong, or leading them down a path that would cause an explosion in their laboratory.

It had been years since he’d thought of the intricacies of the technology he’d made. Kid Flash set himself to going through it all, the earlier stuff that didn’t work out, the mistakes and the small facts that were functionally useless. That was the stuff he could report to Savage. It would tell him vague, insubstantial things, and wouldn’t be of much, if any, help, but it could, for the most part, be the truth. That was the easiest way to lie.

Deathstroke came and fetched him again, his face ever so slightly more impassive as the job presumably began to bore him. This time, he didn’t get the opportunity to take note of their route. They weren’t going to Savage’s office. A lift slid open to admit them. Kid Flash kept his eyes glued to the floor as his stomach dropped and they rapidly descended.

The doors opened to a completely different world than the organized offices and hallways above. For one, there weren’t any walls. Or ceilings, not a human made one, anyway. Stalagmites and stalactites hung from and rose up from surfaces, sculptures made by thousands of years of dripping water. Someone had respectfully fenced them off, so at least the supervillains were being considerate to the environment. Walkways, metal gratings, covered the floor, and a black armoured soldier paused on his way with supplies loaded on a cart in front of him, distinctive black metal marking him as one of Black Manta’s own.

Deathstroke pushed him forward, the hard bits of his glove digging uncomfortably into Bart’s back. The trooper slid his eyes away, and continued with his work. Lost, Bart choose a random direction and started walking. Evidently he’d chosen correctly, but at the next junction he was prodded to the left. Glancing around uneasily, with his unprotected back far too close to the enforcer’s blades, the collared speedster was directed through the walkways, to some mysterious destination.

He saw scientists. Some of them, looking up and seeing him, had a faint flicker of guilt cross their faces, but all of them turned back to their work without prompting. Lex had chosen his people well. Bart wondered what they thought of themselves, whether they believed that the end product was worth the means to get to it, whether they were being threatened, whether they were just working for the sake of discovery. He could emphasise with the thrill of finding something undiscovered, but the idea that discovery was worth it over people’s lives or happiness… that wasn’t something he could comprehend.

Without walls, he spotted the end of his little trip well before he reached it. A glowing case, and inside, a human brain, pulsing faintly with light as an outsized monkey handed it it’s tools. The scientists had mostly been working on theoretical calculations, but the Brain was building something, making a machine that he could only hope would backfire, preferably spectacularly.

“A. Good.” He had no idea why the machine kept that French accent. “Put the boy over there, monsieur Deathstroke. You may take your leave, if you wish. Monsieur Mallah is more than sufficient to keep an unpowered boy from escape.”

“He was kinda chatty yesterday.” Deathstroke smiled. “Less so now. Vandal’s got him on a leash. He knows to behave, for his family’s sake and whatnot. Have fun.”

“I shall attempt to.”

The Brain turned back to its work, soldering something, and Deathstroke strode away, boots clicking on the metal. The gorilla, baring its teeth a little, wrapped a meaty hand around Bart’s arm and tugged, sending him flying into a chair over in the corner that seemed to have been forgotten by the scientists. Either that, or been left there in an attempt to gain favour with the Brain, which was kinda stupid. The machine didn’t have legs. Bart sat on it and curled up, bringing his knees up to his chest and clutching his arms around them, trying to keep warm. Without superspeed, the underground cavern was freezing. And the posture was a comfort. Made him feel like he was presenting less of a target.

Either the Brain wanted to freak him out by making him sit there and not talking to him, or it was too involved in what it was doing to care about the teenager right at that moment. Bart thought it was the latter, as Monsieur Mallah was called away to lift up a bit of metal that the claw things attached to the Brain’s shell couldn’t get purchase on. It looked like the machine was, from the simplest way of looking at it, just welding different types of metal together to make something not entirely unlike a patchwork quilt. To be sent off for testing, Bart would guess. They’d want to figure out which metal to make the machine from.

He was perfectly content to let them do that, while Bart scanned the table beside him. A lamp, a better light source than the lamp, which brought into question why the lamp was there in the first place, and tools were scattered across its surface. Hovering above the table, a screen was covered in numbers. If he thought he could get away with it, he’d change them, twist them a little to make them even more useless, but if the hovering screen was anything like the technology in the Watchtower, they’d know who did it.

The tools were of more interest to him. This wasn’t his time, and the technology wasn’t the same, but the simple fact was that he’d gotten out of an inhibitor collar before. He could do it here too. Complicating his theoretical plan was that, in his time, he’d had help. Neutron had been the one to operate on his collar, not Bart. But he was bigger now, and more experienced, and was supposed to have gotten smarter with age. That would have to be enough.

He still had his gloves on. Everyone and their mother knew what these were used for; to store food rather than the utility belts that Nightwing, Red Robin, and Batgirl used.

God. Would they be looking for him by now? Would they just assume he’d run off again? What would-

No. He couldn’t think about stuff like that. Stuff like that would get him killed. His gloves had compartments, and with the food in them eaten, they were empty. If he put tools in them, he could hide them. Even if they put him through a metal detector, he had a huge lump of inhibitor collar around his throat that would set the machine off. Unless someone found a need to search his every pocket, the tools _should_ go unnoticed. Possibly. Hopefully.

He’d have to grab things that wouldn’t be missed, Bart told himself. That way people would be that much less likely to cast suspicion on him. And he’d have to do it soon, before the Brain and its gorilla were done lugging scrap metal around.

He managed to get three bits of scrap metal, a hook not tied to anything, and a tiny screwdriver into the compartments of his costume before the hulking gorilla and the bright light shining from somewhere down below him that was the Brain, finished their task. The gorilla moved to stand beside him again, and tugged him up, holding Bart almost off the ground with a grip on his right hand. The metal in there stuck into his wrist, and he tried to keep his face blank.

“Put him down, Monsieur Mallah.” The French accent sounded almost bored. “Now, boy, I have questions. You presumably know what will happen to you if you deny me, so I will leave that to my colleagues. You understand?”

He nodded, and dropped his eyes to the floor for what felt like the hundredth time that day.

“Good. Now I know that you, imbecilic child that you are, would not have been left near the machine I will try to duplicate. Research shows that you were the logical choice for cargo. You have a DNA link to back up your claims, and powers that were easily accepted by your accursed teammates. The familial ties were crucial, I would guess, in stopping those heroes from dismissing you entirely.” It seemed to be thinking aloud, a grasper emerging from its shell to grab and inspect a leftover fragment of metal on the bench. “What colour was the time machine?”

Well, if they were going to treat him as a level only just above the gorilla in intelligence, that was fine with him. “Grey.”

“This was before or after it was painted?”

“After.” Bart said carefully, but without hesitation, trying out his first lie. No way had he ever thought to paint the time machine. Aesthetics hadn’t really come into it much.

“And before?” The sharp shard of metal was poised at him, like the tube with a human organ in it was going to throw it at him, but the Brain was really incompetent at threatening. Bart knew for a fact the machinery like that wasn’t meant to launch projectiles, it was pretty clear by the way the joints were put together. If it hit him at all, which was itself dubious, the metal wasn’t big enough to cause more than a scratch.

“I don’t know?” This time, he did hesitate, hoping it didn’t look fake. “I mean…”

“Talk, boy.” The machine snapped and the gorilla grunted behind him, backing up the Brain’s words.

“When I used it to come back it got scratched,” he blurted. “It just looked grey then too.”

“Interesting.” The Brain turned to the floating screen, typing in its response. “That would either imply that it was made of something rather more common than we had thought… or that it was an alloy, not an element. Mallah, remind me to send out a memo to the other researchers. An alloy might have effects on the fabric of space-time… Boy. Did any of the actual makers of the machine mention a power source?”

“No?”

“They would have. At some point they must have. _Think_.”

“The… um….” Bart searched for an answer that made sense, but that wouldn’t give the Brain much to work with. “Some sort of powder? It changed colours a couple times.”

“Finding a more efficient power source would have meant changing what they put in the machine, yes.” He has the distinct feeling that, if it was able to, the Brain would have rolled its eyes. “The final colour of this powder?”

He picked the first colour the came to mind. “Yellow.”

“Either a compound, or an anhydrous crystal, or both.” More thinking aloud. “This would mean… puzzling, but… Boy. Did they say anything about water in the time machine?”

Kid Flash didn’t want to look too keen on answering the questions, but at a prod from Monsieur Mallah, answered. “Uhm, not to get it into the electrical stuff?”

“So there was electrical systems, hm?”

“There was… wiring?”

That was definitely a snort of disgust. “No one teaches those things anymore. Fine. The data would indicate that water was somehow detrimental to the machine, either because it would conduct current away from electrical systems, or for some yet unknown reason. This can be deduced from the anhydrous powder reported to have been fed into the mechanism, and instructions given to the cargo.” That was all written up onto the screen before its attention turned back to Bart. “How many people did they have working on the project?”

 _Two_. “Um, not many?”

“And how long did the construction take, from planning to completion? Or were you not present for every stage of the process?”

“Um, I wasn’t there, no.” He agreed softly, choosing the safer option.

“Specify what stage the machine was at when you came in, and how long it took to get from the stage to completion.”

The safer option still wasn’t that great. “Um, they were working on a shield? I think? And it, it took two years to get from that to coming back to the past.”

“With this, we have confirmation of the need for some sort of barrier between the fluctuating time continuum and the cargo.” A button beeped, and the narration appeared on the glowing screen, the Brain apparently tired of typing things. “One final query, boy.” A claw extended and grabbed a piece of tangled, ripped metal from the bench, showing it to him. “Do you recognise this?”

“A piece of the door…”How had they gotten that?! Wasn’t Mount Justice’s huge crater ruin thingy supposed to be guarded?!

“It is interesting that you can identify this, but not the metal that created it. Provide an explanation.” The Brain ordered, and this was skirting on the edge of too close to the truth.

“I, uh, draw. It’s a hobby. I drew the t-time machine heaps in the future.” He hadn’t drawn at all in the future, but they didn’t have any evidence to go against what he said. The public profile thing Savage had been so happy to show him had drawing listed as a hobby. He could get away with that lie.

“It is noted. Well, Kid Flash Deux, it is regrettable you do not have the scientific knowledge to be truly useful to me. Nevertheless, you have fulfilled your purpose. Monsieur Mallah, you will take him back to his accommodations. Then return to me. The warping induced by travel in this piece of the time machine does not allow us to accurately measure what it is made up of, but I have other tests I must conduct on it.”

Just like that, he ceased to exist in the Brain’s world, the cylinder with its glowing organ turning back to the bench and putting the mangled piece of Bart’s creation back where it had been. The gorilla wasted no time pushing him forward and back toward the lifts. As weird as it was to think it, Bart preferred Deathstroke.

The man himself, holding a cup of coffee, met them just before they found Bart’s cell. Literally found, because the gorilla had already poked his head into three offices and a bedroom before coming upon the right place. The enforcer took over, smoothing ushering Bart into the cell and locking the door, before Monsieur Mallah took off back to do whatever his master wanted of him. Without another word or cutting remark, Deathstroke followed, wandering after the gorilla in the way of a person who had nothing to do but didn’t want to be assigned a job.

Coffee and fighting, Bart reflected wearily, seemed to be the only two things capable of improving Deathstroke’s mood.

He wanted to sit down and rest or something, but first, he had several pieces of contraband to hide. There weren’t any security cameras in the cell, either because the people who’d built it were cheap and lazy, or because Savage knew that Kid Flash’s goggles would be able to pick the electronics out. So at least he didn’t have to worry about that. But he didn’t want to keep his newfound tools on him, not if he was going to have to pay a visit to Savage at any point, so he needed a hiding spot.

Bart chose the toilet in the bathroom. Bolted down to both the floor and the wall, it looked as secure as was possible, but the box behind the seat said different. Hollow with pipes running through it, he didn’t need to crack it open or anything. It was fairly simple to just lift the lid off and put his illegal finds inside, to lie beside the plumbing that channelled water in to flush the thing. Simple, but hopefully enough to hide his tools if someone came into his cell for some strange reason.

There wasn’t exactly a schedule to being called up for interrogation. He should sleep while he could, and then wait for night to start work on the collar. But as easy as it was to tell himself that, actually forcing himself to rest was hard, harder than he’d expected it to be to fall asleep without knockout drugs or a panic attack. He curled up on the mattress and tried to calm his mind or whatever, but it didn’t work. Helplessly, he planned and plotted and drove himself around in circles, until even small things he’d said were second guessed and a cloud of uncertainty hung unhelpfully over him. Finally, Bart reached out and started tapping the wall, counting out the sequence, a sequence that was getting rather absurdly long, but that was the nature of the thing. The hundred and thirty fifth one, that was what he was up to, spirals, golden ratio counting itself out in his head. Seven-three-zero-eight-eight-zero-five-nine-five-two-two-two-one-four-four-three-one-zero-five-zero-two-zero-three-five-five-four-nine-zero. Then the hundred and thirty sixth one. One-one-eight-two-five-eight-nine-six-four-four-seven-eight-seven-one-eight-three-four-nine-seven-six-four-two-nine-zero-six-eight-four-two-seven.

He didn’t fall asleep, but the numbers running through his mind calmed him.

The daze of counting and tapping out beats ended when Deathstroke yanked him to his feet, and he stumbled, hitting the hard corner of the cell’s bed and cursing. The enforcer spared no time to be considerate. Bart was shoved unceremoniously down the hallway, blinking sleep from eyes that hadn’t ever gotten the upside of rest to balance out the gunk that had collected in them. Savage was waiting in his office. Still in the middle of trying to claw his way into wakefulness, Kid Flash slumped down into the couch he’d had the last time he was in the room, and thankfully no one kicked him for it. He rubbed his eyes again, and his brain began to boot back up.

“Apologies, Mr Allen.” Savage’s voice dripped oil, skirting the line between threatening, sleazy and friendly. “You were asleep?”

He managed to cut off the automatic smartarse response before it left his mouth. “Yes.”

“Well, wake up in the name of science, yes? For progress, sleep can be put aside.” With that, the pleasantries, or what amounted to them, were over. Savage scrolled through something on his computer, and looked back up at Bart, who was studiously gazing at the desk, avoiding eye contact. “Your time with the Brain looks to have been… productive.”

Bart wasn’t sure if a reply was needed, or not. He settled for nodding vaguely at the floor.

“Now, I do realise it is late at night.” That was humour, and something of the same tone Vandal had used to threaten Jay and Joan. Bart sat up a little straighter in the seat. “And I am _so_ sorry to ask this of you, dear boy. But I did not get to read the Brain’s report until just a _short_ while ago. And I found something interesting in it, you see.” A hand tapped the screen. It had to have been purely for dramatic effect, because there was no way Bart could see what Savage was pointing towards from the angle he was at.

A long pause followed those words, as the immortal let them sink in.

“It is interesting,” he started back up again, “this part here. ‘Subject reports that it has recorded images of the time machine quote ‘heaps’ unquote in the future time period. As this was when the machine was whole, it would be of interest to see if the subject can duplicate such work on request.’”

Bart pressed his lips together, and crossed his arms over his chest.

“You know what we are asking of you.” The teasing tone of a cat playing with a mouse was gone, all business. “Pen.” Savage gestured to one on the desk. “Paper. You will draw us a picture of the time machine. Than you can rest.”

So bringing him here, dragging him up from rest had been a ploy. Bart could see why it worked. His head felt fuzzy and his body was protesting that it was stressed and uncomfortable and why couldn’t it go back to lying down?

He reached out for the pen and paper. If nothing else, he could just draw a really crap picture. That would probably warrant punishment, though, and Bart didn’t… relish the idea. At all. If he did draw a picture of the actual time machine, of the way it looked, would that be so bad? Could that give anything away? The size of the thing, perhaps. And he’d need to make it look like it had an external power source, make it look like the capsule was the part that travelled back, but that there was more to the machine then that.

For once, he was grateful that he’d spent some time learning how to do something at normal speed. Drawing wasn’t exactly improved by doing it fast, so there wasn’t that much of a difference doing it like this, with his powers locked away, rather than doing it at the speed of reality by choice. It wasn’t great. The pen only outlined the vague shape of the capsule, with lines radiating out from it that implied some sort of machine wizardry.

Implied, but didn’t specify. When he stopped the movement of his hand on the page, Savage glared at him. “That is the best you can do?”

“Four years ago.” Bart explained to the floor by his feet.

“Fine. Send this to the Brain, Deathstroke, and take the boy to his cell. Hopefully tomorrow he will prove himself to be more useful.”

Collared speedsters evidently weren’t the only ones to get tired, Bart noted. Neither Vandal Savage nor Deathstroke noticed when he didn’t give back the pen.

He was put back in his cell, of course, but on the way to it they passed offices. Some of those rooms had been left open, security lax as the people who worked in them wandered off after a hard day’s work. In one of them, he glimpsed a clock. After one am in the morning, which explained why even Savage and the Light’s enforcer were getting tired.

The cell door was locked again, and Deathstroke presumably went to find his bed. Bart actually caught himself looking at the foam mattress with its hard uncomfortable ledge underneath _longingly_ , before he remembered that he had a much more important task to do. As inconvenient as Savage’s wake up interview had been (please, please let him not have forgotten something, let there be nothing useful in his drawing, please) he could use it. It was the middle of the night. He was alone in his cell, and would not be disturbed until morning. He had access to several tools, some bits of sharp metal, and a pen.

Perfect.

Three hours later, and he was almost finished. A spring taken from the pen he’d held on to was keeping a panel open, and Bart was turned awkwardly, spine twisting into an unnatural shape as he tried to keep his head turned so that he could see what he was doing in the mirror. The third piece of scrap metal snapped in his hands, and he put it down without missing a beat, fingers questing for the next in a neat row he’d put within reach. Then he stopped. His fingers drifted back to the broken shards he’d just created. That could work. Carefully, he inserted the tiny sliver of metal into the gap between circuits, and waited.

Five nerve wracking minutes later, the collar started humming. Vibrations purred from it up to his neck, and it would have felt nice against his skin, had Bart not been aware of just what made the sensation. The tremor became audible, a low, deep sound that built on itself, growing and changing pitch, getting higher and higher. It swept through the range of what Kid Flash could hear quickly and vanished back into noise too high for Bart to hear. Finally, the metal shuddered and the trembling ceased.

He sneaked a look at the mirror. The lights displayed on the collar were off. Still standing motionless, eyes fixed on the pair looking back from the glass, Bart stared at himself. The world slowed down. He couldn’t explain how he knew. There wasn’t a bird in flight with its wings paused, or something stopped in mid-air, gravity temporarily left behind. He just knew.

He walked out to the bed in the cell, and collected his goggles, snapping them on and turning off the night vision he didn’t need in a complex lit by lights in the hallways both day and night. His tools he put in the pouches on his gloves, taking away evidence, stopping anyone from learning anything from his success. His success. The word tasted sweet on his tongue, lingering there when Bart didn’t say it out loud. His success, his victory, Savage’s humiliation, it was only just starting. This was the man who had caused his cousin’s death. The man who had made Bart’s world what it was, with his insistent, aggravating, illogical _meddling_. Now the Light was trying to use his technology, use him, to try it all again. 

He had work to do.

Bart blurred out of the collar with its dead light, and caught the circle of harmless mineral in one hand. Time to leave. If Savage was so determined to bring down heaven? Kid Flash would _raise hell_.


	10. Part 9

He ran. He ran, and the world slid sideways and moved and adjusted, until it clicked, and suddenly that speed wasn’t enough, the next speed wasn’t enough, or the next after that. Jogging and pacing himself and saving his energy didn’t matter. The darkness and the stars and the waves, frozen mid-motion as he tore his way over the blank emptiness of the sea didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the burn in his legs and the ache in his arms and the fierce, fae smile on his face, because he had broken his cage, he had twisted his tormentor’s tools against them, and their hold on him was as insubstantial as air, as math, as emotion and light and the space between atoms.

When Kid Flash hit land, he turned north. Past a huge forest (water ways, painting, blurring-through-trees) and sprawling homes (city, people, Atomic-Skull-Bunker-fight), past a border that could not even make him hesitate in the beat of his feet on the ground. Past more familiar land marks, swerving to avoid a mountain in his way. Through the night, through darkness and the silence of speed and countless sleeping people who would never know he’d run there, to home.

To a garden that had far too many weeds in the corners. A washing line that had been lowered. A doormat that had seen everyone from Wildcat to Batman pass through its doors. A ridiculous, stupid metal helmet with stylized lightning bolts on the cap. A red shirt with a yellow bolt printed on it, old and tucked away with the rest of the mementos of days long gone past. Home.

Home was in danger.

“Get up.” The two figures on the bed, wrapped in sheets and duvet, stirred. “Get up!”

“Bart?” Joan was the first one to pull herself upright. “Bart! Bart where have you been, it’s been three days, its, its four in the morning!”

“Get. Up.” He repeated himself.

“Bart Allen!” Jay was awake then. And unusually cross with him, but the first thing was the important one. “Explain yourself! What on earth is going on?”

“Jay, you’re going to have to run. I can carry Joan. We have to leave. Now.” In a quick twitch of movement, he tossed clothes onto their bed. “I don’t have time to explain.”

His guardians might have been old, but they were experienced. Quickly, both of them got into their clothes, Bart turning his back politely as Joan got dressed. “Do I need the uniform?” Jay asked quietly.

“No. This is about protecting you, not sending you out to fight.”

Joan didn’t say anything, but Kid Flash could see her relief. He picked her smaller frame up, tucked the dead shell of the inhibitor collar into her lap, and nodded to Jay. Without another word, the two speedsters left the house.

Jay was a great, great deal slower than him. Bart couldn’t remember when, precisely, he’d gotten so slow, because Jay and Wally had always had a lower top speed than him and Barry, but it was noticeable now as he twitched, the weight of Joan in his arms more of an effort than the running itself. And Joan wasn’t exactly heavy. They were going too slowly, his reawakened, twitchy, volatile instincts told him. They’d be caught, locked up, collared- but no. No one knew he was missing, not yet. He had time to get the people he considered family to safety.

He ran ahead, just by a few seconds, and lowered Joan carefully to the ground, taking the collar from her before whirling on the console for the Central City Zeta tube and flying his hands over it. The computer already knew Jay and Joan. Authorizing them as emergency guests was well within his authority.

Jay caught up with them as Bart finished, and helped his wife to her feet, looking at Bart with a gaze that was confused and comforting, all at once. “Zeta tube.” Bart said hurriedly. “We get in, come on, thisisn’tnewstuffwehavetomove.”

Joan, elegant and dignified even at four in the morning wearing clothes that were wrinkled and not entirely matched, went first, the computer recognising her and her temporary designation and spiriting her away. Bart jerked his head, urging Jay to follow her. There was no way, no possible way that Savage had discovered his absence yet, that his escape had been found, but his eyes scanned the rooftops anyway, and his hands flexed and itched as the scrap metal and bits of pen rattled around in the pouches on his forearms. It was only after the first Flash had dematerialized in rotating light that Kid Flash followed, backing into the machine with eyes still watchful.

The Watchtower’s grand and cavernous main room was empty. Of course it was. Through the massive sheets of glass separating the people within from the void of space, Bart could see the curve of the planet. The sunlight was only just beginning to reach across the Atlantic ocean. Daybreak for the American continent was yet to arrive. Somewhere down there, past the cities that glowed like fireflies in the dark, across deep, unresponsive reaches of water, the Light was sleeping on their island. He nearly had enough reassurances to start searching for the place.

His phone was long gone, which was a pity, because some of the functions he wasn’t supposed to have on there would have been useful. Kid Flash could only hope that it had gotten the same rough treatment from Deathstroke as the communicator that had formerly hidden under the symbols that shielded his ears from the wind. He hated the idea of the Brain taking his little machine and tearing it apart, learning secrets it wasn’t supposed to from the modifications on the device.

So he drew up a screen from the air, typing in an access code and sending out the call. “Barry? Barry?! Flash, come in, report.”

The teenager didn’t know how Barry answered that fast. “Who’s that? What up?”

“It’s Bart.” He said shortly, speech speeding up as he talked to his fellow speedster. “Iris and the kids are in danger, I’ve got Jay and Joan up in the Watchtower, you should bring them here. And put on your uniform, kay? This is so far from crash it’s not funny.”

“Emergency?”

“Vandal Savage himself made the death threats. Get here, Barry, getherenow.”

The connection snapped off, but not before he heard the panicked crying of a child woken abruptly from deep sleep. The Allen family was on their way. He could trust Barry to take care of his wife and their children and to not treat it like a joke. There weren’t many people who didn’t make the assumption that every word that came out of his mouth was a joke, but Barry, Jay, and Joan had known him long enough to be able to make that distinction.

The screen he started to use for other things. Among the many functions of the technology pumped like lifeblood throughout the League’s space station was an extensive program meant to help the members of the League and Team who weren’t natural born detectives. He booted it up, and ran through the database. An island, quite far off shore, off South America, warm climate, and Vandal had said that there were criminals already operating above ground, masking the Light’s presence underneath.

It was enough information to narrow down the extensive library into just a few pages. The first he rejected outright. Whatever island the Light had been operating from had been further north. The second looked not entirely unlike the quick glimpse he’d gotten of the outside of the island before he ran, but it was the third that caught Bart’s interest. Santa Prisca. Base to a drug smuggling operation that had been going on for years, despite the Justice League’s intervention, but more importantly, the Light had used it before. The summit they’d hosted between their forces and the Reach, the one the Team had so fantastically crashed, that had been held in the caves under the island. Caves like the ones the Brain was working out of.

Island found. Now he had to- “Barty?”

The tiny hand tugging on his costume urged him down, lowering his head to the tiny figure’s level. “Yes Dawn?”

“Why we gotta come here? Why’s der a big ball outside?”

Grubby hands latched onto him. With a sigh, Bart lifted his aunt up into his arms, twisting the collar in his hands underneath the little girl to make a sort of seat for her to perch on. The three year old (if he asked, he was sure he’d get a report on how many quarters Dawn could add to that year) continued jabbering, pointing at the pretty ball that was her entire world, spread out below them. “Barry?” He called lowly.

The Flash appeared at his shoulder in a blur of red covered speed, bland head poking out uncovered from his costume. “Yeah? Want to tell me what this’s all about?”

“Call a red alert. You have the clearance to do it.”

“You... wait, what?!” His grandfather kept his voice down, but that question was urgent and worried. “Why?!”

“The puzzle Red Robin and the other detectives have been working on. The Light hasn’t been trying to incite mass criminal warfare. That’s Queen Bee and Klarion making a distraction. They’ve got another project, and it’s got the potential to put the world so far back on mode… The Light are building a time machine.”

“A… time machine? Bart, that’s impossible, the-“

“You are talking to a time traveller. It is possible. It is happening, right now, on an island called Santa Prisca, and I can say that with confidence, Barry, because I’ve just spent the past three days locked up in there, being interviewed. Well, interrogated. Well…” Bart put Dawn down on the floor, and held up the innocuous band of metal she’s been sitting on. “Imprisoned.”

His grandfather’s eyes caught on the object in Bart’s hands and hardened. The Flash pulled on his hood, and his eyes disappeared behind white. “I’ll call in the League.”

“Great.” Bart picked up Dawn again. “You want some food, sweetie? How ‘bout I go get your brother thisplacehas a great big television to watch.”

“Mama doesn’t let us look at TV before breakfast.” She said reasonably.

“I’m sure she will today.”

“Nope.”

“Really sweetie, she will.”

“Why you call me weetie, Barty?”

“Um…” A child not much more than a toddler wouldn’t understand what a petname was. She certainly wouldn’t understand that Bart wanted, needed something to call her that didn’t remind him of the aunt he’d once had, that this little girl would never be for him. “Just... just look at the prettybigball. Look at the sunrise.”

“Kay.” The tiny body muttered, half buried in the crook of his neck.

As her breathing deepened and the little fists relaxed, Kid Flash knew that Dawn wouldn’t be doing much looking. But he still held her, looking out the window, watching the sunrise.

Somewhere behind him, Iris collected chairs and made a little corner, bringing up a screen with a softly playing children’s show that rang almost unnoticeable from where Bart was standing. Don laughed, absurdly loud in the relative silence, and was drawn back by his mother. The Flash was working, pulling up screens and issuing quiet, urgent commands, waking the heroes and summoning them, with Jay working by his side until Joan caught him and tugged the oldest speedster down, planting Don in his lap to keep them both occupied.

Bart watched the world turn, the girl who would have been his aunt pillowed on his shoulder, drooling onto the shoulder pads meant to protect him from blows and bullets both. The planet underneath him was dark, the light of dawn only just beginning to stretch over the curved horizon. Cities shone out like glow-worms, excess light spilling over into space. He couldn’t see the island that he’d just run from. Maybe that was because the Light was careful, the Light was cautious. Or maybe it was just because, from so many thousands of kilometres or miles or whatever you wanted to measure it with up in space, things got lost.

The murmuring behind him signalled the arrival of the first vigilantes, the low calm tones of Aqualad replacing Flash at the knot of glowing screens that was the nexus of his work. He lost track of his uncle in the reflections on the huge sheets of glass, and the slight gush of misplaced air that he heard meant that his grandfather had left the room for whatever reason. Beast Boy’s yelp echoed through the strangely hushed room, and Iris began to scold Don, reminding him to respect others personal space, even if the other had a lovely green furred tail. Don burst into tears, but was comforted by an oddly green koala, and soon settled back down.

Jay and Joan were noticed, and he heard the careful lull of conversation start up as younger heroes got their chance to speak to older. Bart heard his name mentioned, but no one made to come bother him. Whether that was because they saw something in his body language and the way he tracked his family by their reflections in the glass, watchful and tense, or whether it was simply the girl sleeping in his arms, he didn’t care. He’d have to explain soon. Best to only do it once.

“You’re tired.” Barry appeared at his shoulder.

“No.”

“Your hands shouldn’t be shaking. I know Dawn’s heavy, but she’s not that big, not yet. I’ll swap you.” Despite the speed of their speech, far faster than anyone outside their family could understand without recording it and playing it back at the same speed as the rest of the world, Barry’s tone was gentle, and his hands, when they came to lift Dawn away, were slow.

He let the little girl go into her father’s arms before he accepted the plastic bag the Flash was carrying. “Protein bars?”

“I’ve got a stash. You really look like you could use them.”

Bart’s lips quirked upwards. “When did you become so paternal.”

“I don’t know. Don’t tell Iris, will you?”

“Paternal isn’t mature. The day you get less enjoyment than your twin three year olds do from those stupid TV shows is the day I start to worry.”

“Bart?” He shifted the child, cradling her in one arm with the strength of a man who regularly went up against supervillains used to keep the little red head steady. “You aren’t going to say anything about whatever’s got you running, are you.”

“No. Not until everyone’s here. It’s... not something I want to say twice.”

Barry nodded, accepting that. “Fine. But, Kid Flash, tell me. They threatened our family, didn’t they.”

It wasn’t a question. It was the statement of a father long resigned to the possibility, if not any more pleased with the idea. “Yes. They did. They have the resources to back it up, too.” He snapped one of the protein bars.

“What’re you going to do?”

“What make you think I’ll do anything?” Bart asked, curious. He tore the plastic that companies were so keen to encase every possible piece of food in off with his teeth, and gulped down an unappealing, but sustaining bar of whatever-it-was that they put in those things.

“I know you. You’ve got a look in your eyes. Like a chemical reaction just about to start.”

Bart didn’t know why everyone thought that the conversations he had at superspeed were always excited and full of bouncing energy. This was calm, measured, comfort offered to him in less than the space of a second, but that second was more than enough. “Chemistry’s your thing. I prefer to think of it like quantum mechanics, much more crash.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. There’s an example, ‘bout a cat that’s alive and dead at the same time until it’s observed. Something can, theoretically, be two things at once, until it’s been measured and observed, which forces it into one state.”

“Seriously?”

“Mm-hmm. I’ve been observed, Barry, measured. Now I’m being forced into one state.”

“Then what were you before?” Their shoulders touched, lightly, briefly, at the same height. “If you’re one thing now, what two things were you before?”

“Dangerous and innocent? Happy and sad? Here and not here?” He shrugged, and his shoulder pads bunched up Flash’s uniform. “I don’t know. Stuff’s going to happen, Barry. Lies are going to have to be cleared out. I’m going to have to do some very destructive things to stop something that I created from causing a whole heap of pain.”

“Wasn’t aware that you’d been lying, Bart.”

“You’re not supposed to be aware. That’s kind of the point.”

“This is scaring me slightly, just a bit. You don’t sound like you’re okay.”

“I… don’t worry about it. Iris and the kids and Jay and Joan, they’re safe. Now I just need to make sure I’ve got a threat up my sleeve to stop Vandal Savage from trying to get to them.”

“Savage.” They’d been standing still for long enough that the heat that they both gave out was spilling over, actually getting as far as making contact with the other speedster. It was a mark of how serious the subject was. Barry had lost Wally. Bart had lost other people too. “He won’t get near my children.”

“No.” Bart slowed himself down to real time. “He won’t.”

Dawn shifted, muttering, and her father carried her away to join her twin, who had fallen asleep spread eagled on Jay. Bart looked around. The main room was, if not full -the day that the room was filled was the day Bart volunteered himself for therapy- quite a lot more crowded than usual. The occupants had grouped into some small semblance of order, with the Team all together and the League formed up into their own bunches, but with the sun only beginning to reach the continent below them and eyes still blinking sleepily, organized ranks weren’t happening. A cleared spot in the centre was where the leaders of various squads and missions usually took to the stage, and Bart came to a sudden, uncomfortable realization that this time, it had been left vacant for _him_.

Twisting his face up into his usual smile felt wrong, and the effort fell flat as Bumblebee stepped daintily out of the crowd, ruffled his hair and encasing him in a hug. “’M not five.” He grumbled.

“Suck it up and deal with it.” She poked him in return.

“Thanks. But I’ve got to, er, do whatever you’re supposed to do leading one of these things.”

“Get a screen up. Show us a target.” The instructions were gentler than a lot of the one’s he’d gotten from Nightwing in the past weeks.

“Right,” he nodded, and Bumblebee merged back into the crowd to lean against Guardian. “Any reason you’re all being so soft on me?”

“Frankly? You look like someone’s dragged you through a bush, smeared dirt in odd places, and then thrown you in a lake.” La’gaan’s half insulting, half concerned tone was a strange one, but it matched his friend. “I can smell the salt water on you from here. What’cha do, minnow, this ain’t the time to go for a swim.”

Bart snorted, and the sound surprised him. He grinned at La’gaan in thanks, and took his place in the empty space, because even if he was surrounded on all sides, it was friends and allies and the people who he watched play video games in the room somewhere underneath his feet that made up the crowd. “Alright. So, um, to put it simply? Shit’s going down.”

“Elaboration required.” Red Tornado said unemotionally. “You have not given the specifications of the perceived threat.”

“Well, yeah, it’s not crash, and it’s sort of my fault, and mostly it’s just unbelievable, so sorry about that.” Bart flicked his hands through the air, calling up a screen and searching through the database for the island he’d identified. “Santa Prisca. The Team’s been there before, the Light’s been known to use it, and it’s where they are right now. They’re making… well, they’re makingatimemachine.”

The room visibly stiffened, shoulders tensing and wings fluffing and a collective feeling of foreboding as each and every member of the Bat-family narrowed their eyes.

“Yeah, it isn’t good.” Bart confirmed, running his hand through his hair and unseating tufts of it that fell out of his costume, sticking up unevenly with the grime of three days without a bath. “Savage didn’t explicitly state as much, but I think that the aim is to reboot the Reach invasion, but with the foreknowledge to get the world on the mode they choose.”

“Is that even possible?” Wonder Woman stepped forward, combative. “Time travel is-“

“Think about who you’re talking to.” Nightwing muttered.

“No, she’s right.” Kid Flash shrugged, a stressed jerk of his shoulders that had nothing in common with the easy, casual, relaxed movement it normally was. “Under normal circumstances, time travel is impossible. But the Light’s very determined.

“They’re using a whole lot of their resources to do this. Queen Bee and Klarion are behind the weird attacks all over the world, I’m almost completely sure of that. Blank Manta and his troops are guarding the island, I think they’ve got an arrangement with the drug operations going on above, but there’s no way that they trust each other. Ra’s al Ghul seems a little less involved then the rest of them, but his men were sent to capture me with Deathstroke, so he’s not out of the picture. Savage is overseeing from an office, I think he’s the one that figured out I’m from the future, and the Brain is underneath it all in some caves working on actually making the machine with some of Lex Luthor’s scientists that’ve been donated to help out. They’re all in on this.”

“Hold on, did you say that you were captured?” Static yelped, and Bart felt his hair briefly stand on end as his Teammate’s power fizzled.

“What, you think I’d find all this out just from running past the place?” he retorted. “Deathstroke and Black Spider and some people who weren’t important enough to have names took me down in a trailer park. Then I spent three days dealing with Savage.”

“Why did they want _you_?”

“I’m the only thing with practical experience in time travel thatIknowof. Make sense, really, but I didn’t play ball. They’ve got information that’s wrong, outdated, or really a complete lie.”

“Dude, you lied to Vandal Savage?” Beast Boy sounded impressed.

“I’m used to it.”

“So this island, Santa Prisca.” Superman took the conversation back on track, although out of the corner of his eye, Kid Flash could see Batgirl eyeing him like a logic puzzle. “You’re sure it’s where they’re based?”

“Not absolutely,” he figured it was time to be serious, “but the island I was on had criminals operating on the surface, a fairly warm climate, wasn’t that far from South America, and had caves underground. The database only shows two islands that match that, and Santa Prisca’s been used by the Light before. It makes sense.”

“You’ve got evidence for this time machine angle, right?” One of the Green Lanterns, the one that didn’t wear a mask, questioned him.

“Again, not absolutely. I do have it!” He blurted before anyone could ask otherwise. “But it’s, um, whatdoyoucallit, it’s circumstantial. Boxes of Radon missing from a warehouse, an atomic clock that was stolen from Paris, bits of machinery used to make a particle accelerator, and I found this when we were looking through the evidence we got from the missions, but I didn’t think it meant anything.”

He called up a screen, and went into the deleted files. Computers worked in a strange way. When you deleted something, it wasn’t really gone. It was just put in a list of things the computer could overwrite, if the machine needed more space. With a little bit of luck, he found the little bit of data sitting at the back of nowhere, and pulled it out. The equation he’d thought the he’d typed flashed up on screen.

“Math?”

“Equation, more physics actually.” He said absently with a little jerk where he stood, the weight of everyone’s eyes pinning him down like a bug on a windshield. The line of mathematics was the same as the one he’d figured out, years ago and in the future, but Bart sincerely doubted that he’d been the person who had typed this one down. “One of the first ones for time travel.”

“I think that’s enough to require a look into this,” Icon intoned with a voice so deep Bart really didn’t have trouble believing that he was alien.

“Sure, but I want to know what Radon is. Why haven’t I heard of it?” Someone else asked, behind too many people for Bart to see who it was.

“Radon’s a colourless, odourless gas that’s fairly dense at room temperature, and it’s the densest noble gas we’ve got.” Bart rattled off on automatic pilot. “It’s also a product of the decay of uranium and thorium, and it’s pretty violently radioactive. Even though it’s radioactive, because it’s a noble element it’s not _chemically_ very reactive, which makes it pretty crash to play with.”

“The second you start playing with a radioactive _gas_ is the second we finally send you off to a psychiatric ward.” Nightwing smirked, and the joke brought back the fact that these were his friends, people he’d seen in their underpants and covered in strange goo. It helped settle the shiver that wanted to break out. “So, how many people do we need to deal with this once and for all? It’s only one island, but this is the Light we’re talking about.”

“Do you know if the criminal operation running on the surface would join forces with the Light to fend off any attacks?” Kaldur asked from where he stood next to Aquaman.

“I don’t know, but if they see Leaguers, they’ll attack, it’s pretty much instinct. So probably, yeah.”

“Do we send in a stealth team then?” Black Lightning wondered out loud.

“I believe we will need the power necessary to destroy their research.” The Martian Manhunter pointed out. “In terms of sheer destruction, a stealth squad may not be enough.”

“Me and Kid Flash could run in there, steal everything.” The Flash suggested half-heartedly.

“Never work.” Superboy waved the idea off.

“Excuse me-“ Batgirl piped up.

“What about ships? The bioship isn’t big enough for everyone.” Miss Martian put in.

“Three squads should be sufficient.” Batman said, with authority.

“I fail to understand that equation. It is fundamentally flawed.” Red Tornado pointed out, as close to exasperation as he ever got.

“EXCUSE ME!” The room shut up. Batgirl took a deep breath, and the next thing she said wasn’t at that ear-splitting volume. “Kid Flash, your story doesn’t add up.”

“What? I-it should, I mean, I was there. I might lack story telling skills, but it still happened,” he protested.

“It couldn’t have.” She cleared the space around her, pulling up her own screen. “Look, you said you were captured, yeah? Why didn’t you just phase out of there?”

“They put a collar around my neck, why’d you think? I can’t run on mode.”

“But that doesn’t make sense, because if they put a collar on you, how did you escape afterwards? And how do you know what Radon is? For that matter, why do you recognise that equation, and why did you bring the rest of your family to the Watchtower, and what happened to your communicator?! You;re lying. Or you aren’t telling us something.” Her face hardened, and she glared at him. “I want to know what it is.”

“Yeahnope.”

It came out before he thought about it, a short burst of words slurring together. Even if the heroes around him couldn’t hear the words being said, the tone was clear enough, denial and refusal and guilt. That last one was the spark that started the chemical reaction.

“Kid Flash? She does have a point.” Aqualad murmured.

“Clear up your story.” Batman loomed.

“Yeah, why’re you so twitchy?” Wonder Girl stalked toward him. “Explain the stuff she said, bucko.”

He backed away, phasing through Red Tornado. “Factual evidence is required.” The android droned.

Captain Atom crossed his arms, and Bart changed directions away from him. “You’re hiding something.”

“If you are we need to know.” Superman reasoned.

“Noyoudon’tneverneededtoknowbefore-“ he clapped a hand over his mouth to stop anything else that might want to slip out.

“What? Needed to know _before_ , what does that mean?!” With a sinking sensation as he practically felt the mode descending, he turned to look at the Flash. “Okay, now you really have to explain.”

“I do not want to.” Bart gritted out, and he could see Blue Beetle, and damnit, Jaime would know about the stress talking thing that he did, and the others were getting way to close, so he zipped backwards again, up onto the podium of raised steps in front of the Zeta tubes.

From there he could see the faces of everyone in the room. It wasn’t a reassuring sight. His friends looked worried, and confused in a particularly adorable, naïve way, but the adults were much worse. Hawkwoman looked half a second away from outright attacking him, her mace in her hands and wings spread to take off, and most of the other members of the Justice League weren’t much better. Lying was taken pretty damn seriously, and he’d just as good as admitted he’d been keeping things from them, stupid, idiotic loud mouth that he was.

“Bart.” His grandfather ordered, and it was abnormal and a sign of just how not-crash this was going to be that he used Kid Flash’s real name. “You come in here telling me about time machines and a plan from the Light that you’ve miraculously discovered, you call in my family and tell me they’re in danger, you get me to call in the League, you explain everything that we need to do, but not why we need to do it, and you’re hiding facts from us.”

In a blur of speed, Jay Garrick appeared at the foot of the steps, looking up at him with a gaze that at once told Bart he’d been listening and made him feel like a singularly foul piece of dirt. “You need to explain. _Now_.”

“I reallyreally don’t want to.” His feet drew him backwards again.

“Computer; lock Zeta tubes.” Batman barked. “No one’s going anywhere until you explain what is going on, because Batgirl is clearly right. I want to know what you’re hiding.”

“Itsbeen fouryears andyouask NOW?!”

“Well it’s not like you’ve been lying for four-“ Barry stopped in the middle of his sentence, and Bart saw the spilt-second expression of dawning realisation before his face screwed up in pain. “Bart. You can’t have.”

“Didn’t really lie thatmuch!” He couldn’t make Bart tell him, he couldn’t make him, Bart might’ve said some of that out loud, but Barry couldn’t make him.

“What’s so important? What the hell is going on with you?! Bart, I am your grandfather, and you WILL tell us!”

“WHY? Why should I, it’s not like I ever knew you, not like you’re my father!”

“No, but your father’s crawling around watching telly-tubbies, so it falls to me to-“

“MY FATHER IS DEAD.” The tension that had built up in him snapped, and his teeth bared themselves, defensive and backed into a corner and holy fucking shit, he wanted to run. “That kid is NOT my father. Don’t you tell me that. My father died when I was nine, and that child will NEVER be what he was.”

About half of that hadn’t gotten into the Flash’s head. All he heard was an insult to his child. “Don is going to grow up to be _just_ as good as your father!”

“ _Just_ as good?” Bart laughed, and it sounded horribly, terribly wrong, like the laugh that the old and the dying and the beaten had giggled in the ash. “Barry, he is going to grow up to be so fucking BETTER than my father. And you know why?”

He spread his hands, cause it was a joke that they just weren’t getting, wasn’t it, funny and horrible and morbid. “Because my parents grew up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland enslaved by the aliens who took over the Earth,” his voice light as he got to the punch line, “and he _won’t_. And _that’s_ why I need you people to go rip Santa Prisca apart. I have seen that future,” he laughed again, a shade closer to normality, “and it is dirt, and this Watchtower lying embedded in the remains of New York City. It is a world with ash in the sky and no sunlight and guards in red armour. It is dust, and despair, and _meat_ taken to be used, and it is death, and starvation, and dying because no one bothers to give slaves enough food to eat. THAT is my world, my home, my childhood, and it is what I am TRYING TO PREVENT HERE.”

It was the pause in the beat of the music, right after it hit a crescendo. It was the moment of free fall after a long climb. It was the vague, unsatisfied feeling after climax came and went, the moment taken and used and now finally free. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, or if meeting anyone’s eyes was a good idea. Stick to what he knew. He grinned, felt it falter on his face to a shadow, but amped it up again. There. Almost as good as the real thing.

“For clarification,” a robotic voice sounded out from Red Tornado. Trust that one to have processed everything, come up with queries, and come back to him with concerns while the rest of the world started to pity him. He could almost feel affection for the guy. “This is the information you did not share?”

Because if he was going to rip open one un-talked about secret, why not bare the other one, too? “Well, I’m also gay, but I don’t really think anyone gives a shit ‘bout that at the moment.”

“You are smiling.” The rest of the room was still frozen, but at least he could rely on the android to require answers about illogical human behaviour.

“At least you all know now. Oh, yeah, and about the gaping holes in my story. My communicator was ripped out while I was drugged, which sucks, but they let me keep the goggles. So yay, guess I don’t have to replace them. I know about the Radon and the equation thingy on the file ‘cause I was… involved, let’s say, in the construction of the time machine. You’re right, Red, the math does work out wrong, but it’s a first step on the way to what you need.”

“Acceptable. Your answers fit in with the evidence you have provided.”

“Mm-hmm.” He launched himself off the steps, to Iris and Joan and the little girl sitting with them. Ignoring the adults, he crouched down in front of Dawn, softened the bared teeth into something more human. “Hey, sweetie?”

“Why you shout, Barty?” The innocence of a child.

“I don’t like being pushed into a corner.” At her look of incomprehension, he tried again. “Look, I promise to use an inside voice next time, kay? You still have that circle you were sitting on before?” He asked gently.

“Da put it over dere.” She pointed.

“Thanks.” He picked up the inhibitor collar.

Maybe they were in shock, but it usually took more than that to silence the League. He got the feeling they were waiting to see what he would do, as Kid Flash darted back to the raised steps. The silence was watchful, its exceptions to that being most of the younger members of the Team, and Jay and Barry, who he was avoiding looking at.

He snapped the collar around his neck. Most of the heroes in the room flinched, because that was a symbol for pretty much the worst thing that could happen to them. Take away their powers, and they were, if not defenceless, made distinctly uncomfortable in their own bodies. “Relax. Like I’d bring a live one in here.” Bart grumbled. “This is the collar Savage put me in. It’s, um,” he waved his arm in a blur, “obviously off mode. Which, by the way, is the literal meaning of that bit of lingo, an off mode collar.

“Anyway, I figured out how to get these things off when I was, like, eleven? Somewhere round then, but I couldn’t really tell you how old I was. We didn’t really have birthdays. I wasn’t the first person to work it out or anything, but the latest update usually removed the faults in the last version. By my time period, the collars that the Reach put on metahumans were pretty complex, so this one’s kinda simpler than what I’m used to.” He flipped up the panel on the side with one finger, and tapped the vacant lights before taking the thing off again. “I think I’ve explained everything?”

“You have presented evidence or explanations for every query that Batgirl raised with the report you gave.” Red Tornado confirmed. “Save on one.”

“Crash. Which one’s that?”

“I believe the automaton is inquiring as to the presence of the members of your family and guardians here.” Doctor Fate spoke up, and it was sort of weird that the only people asking him stuff were the emotionless ones.

“Oh, right. Vandal Savage threatened them. It was bad really. The whole torture thing didn’t really mode me that much, so he,” Bart waved a hand vaguely in Jay and Joan’s directions, “he said he’d do it to them. Break their bones and put them in a cell next to me so I could watch them starve. And some other things, but that was the general idea.” He scowled and spat. “That’s why I’m looking forward to making him regret that.”

No one else asked anything, and as he fidgeted, silence descended. It was easier to meet the eyes of the Justice League. They were watching him, in the way that anyone who thought they knew of someone but who has found out they have been lied to watches that person. The key thing was the ‘knew of’, though. The adults he had fought with, trained with and listened too, but they weren’t part of the Team, and most of them were far from being in his age group. It was the judging and perceptiveness of observers weighting up new information, and while they didn’t look happy or comfortable they also didn’t have any little bits of betrayal dotted around their faces.

The Team was another matter. It was alright to look at them, but only because they weren’t looking at him. The only ones making eye contact were Aqualad and Miss Martian, the Atlantian on the very deepest end of not pleased, and the green skinned girl surprisingly steady as she eyed him up. The rest of them were gazing off into space, or at the floor. Someone was missing from the group. There wasn’t any orange in the line-up.

He sensed rather than saw Tigress walking up the stairs closer to him, breaching what felt like a suddenly massive bubble of personal space, but instead of turning to talk to her, the teenager continued down the line of superheroes, to the two men standing at the front. Barry and Jay were both staring at him. He flinched.

A warm hand poked at the side of his neck, not unkindly. “We need to get you new stupid-looking lightning bolt things.” Tigress said quietly.

“It is perfectly easy to get the communicators out without tearing off the outside shell.” Bart replied without thinking, not quite tearing his eyes away from a place just above Jay’s head. “I am annoyed they didn’t try that, instead of just ripping it all out.”

“Yeah, well, supervillains aren’t exactly known for their consideration.” He couldn’t see Artemis’ face under her mask, something that usually didn’t bother him. But right now, getting a glimpse of what she was thinking would’ve been useful.

“One more thing to add to a list of complaints. Someone shouldtalkto the Light about their hospitality.” The snark in him, being such a deeply embedded and well-honed skill, was turning back on.

“I’d say that I’m hoping this is all a prank,” Artemis sighed, some of her mane of blonde hair falling over her collarbone, “but it’s really not, is it. Stop smiling. There’s no way you’re relaxed after blurting _that_ out.”

“I’m not relaxed.” He admitted in a sort of echo, drumming his fingers against his thigh.

“Drop the smile then.”

“Can’t.” The wattage of it had been dimming the moment he’d plastered the expression on his face, but the suggestion of putting a shield like that down made him feel naked. It got a lot smaller and a tiny bit more real as he looked at her, the girl that had been forcibly kidnapped into the Flash family after his cousin’s death. “Can we go now?”

“And… do what?”

“We should really get your short term memory assessed. You’re getting dull in your old age. As much as I don’t want to have a touchy feely talk, Savage is still in the middleofmaking a time machine. If we go quickly, he might not even have discovered that I’ve left my cage.”

“Bart.” Her voice didn’t have any of the lightness in it that it normally suffused itself in when they bantered. “You can’t just run off.”

“Why not? I’ve done it to many times to count.” He held up a hand to forestall the protest that was ready to growl at him from Tigress’ throat. “No, I get it. Kinda. You guyshavequestions, and that’s fine. However, we also have future technology inthehands of an alliance of supercriminals, so dealing with that needsto happen first. I promise that afterwards, you can grill me any way you like. Ask me whateveryouwant, and I’ll give you the in depth explanation that should have probably happened years ago.” He perked up. “I’ve even got illustrations.”

“If we deal with the situation you seem so keen to resolve,” he was more than a little surprised that it was Captain Marvel who spoke up, “you’ll come back here? And answer everything, yeah? Nothing left out?”

“Mostly everything,” Bart corrected. “I won’t tell you about the tech, or the details of the time machine. And I won’t go into too much detail about things that could still happen. There are a couple of…incidents that could still occur in this time line, because the things that set them off still happened.” Red Hood and Oracle, just to name two specific to the Batfamily. “Other than that, yes. I don’t know if many of you would be interested, but I’ll tell you everything about my childhood and the history of that world.”

“You’ll be held to that.” Black Canary crossed her arms, impassive look shifting to a glare.

Bart nodded, accepting that as pretty much the lightest consequence he could get away with. “Santa Prisca?”

“The League will deal with it. The Team, I think,” Aquaman looked at the young people beside him, “need some time to adjust. Zatanna, Flash, Captain Marvel, and Rocket will stay here too.”

“Hey.” Captain Marvel scowled.

“You are in Kid Flash’s circle of acquaintances. And I think the Flash is… he should stay here too. Red Tornado will look after you.”

In a moment of either uncommon awareness or unheard of obedience, no one else protested the Atlantian King’s words. Bart put on his goggles absentmindedly, almost by accident, and watched shrewdly from under lenses where no one could see his eyes as the League flapped, floated, and filed past him and Tigress. Batman reached the Zeta tubes, and typed something in. The computer beeped in acknowledgement as the transportation from Watchtower to ground unlocked itself.

The world slowed down. Kid Flash sped up. He clasped Artemis’ hand in apology as he passed her within the gap between seconds and reached the Zeta tubes, cutting in front of Captain Atom. The computer scanned him first. The swirling light took yellow and red away before any of the League could stop him. Time slurred back to normal as reflexes kicked in, and a gloved hand reached toward him in an abortive action that was too little, too late.

The League would take Santa Prisca apart. Bart Allen would not be stuck on the Watchtower patiently waiting for them to do it.


	11. Part 10

 

The world reformed around him and Bart blurred into movement, aware that as soon as the Justice League could they’d be sending the next person through to either try to stop him or guess where he was going. Running with his ears exposed felt odd, until he went above the speeds of any winds not found in a tornado and passed the reach of sound, the world clicking over into silence.

From there, he swerved. Changing directions meant that he was harder to track, of course, but mostly it was following the still-lit light glow of a city to find civilization, and hopefully, a map. He slowed down, searching for a city centre. Not the biggest shopping mall, but the collection of shops along a street that would inevitably have a lake or a square or a church in the middle as a tourist attraction. Those were the places that had maps. Then, belatedly, he remembered that his goggles could do that for him. Let it never be said the Kid Flash was the smartest cookie on the plate. It didn’t take long to find what he wanted and thankfully he wasn’t too far away from Gotham. Admittedly, going north was a little strange when the island where Savage would be waking up to begin his day was south, but there was method behind his madness.

Batman didn’t throw anything away. Not outdated Batmobiles and not old weapons, but certainly, definitely not alien tech. It was all stored by him after anyone who wanted it at the Watchtower was finished with it, and the place where it was all stored was kinda obvious. The Batcave had been full of boxes and half dismantled creations and half built machines when Bar had visited, although it was hard to tell the difference between the last two. If Bart wanted what he thought he wanted (and oh yes, he wanted it), then the only way to get the familiar technology he was used to working with was to go borrow it from the Dark Knight.

Dude, but Bruce Wayne’s house was massive. Batman could hide an army in there. He rang the doorbell, and hopped back. When no one answered in the next three seconds, he rang it again, jabbing rapidly at the button until the door opened and Kid Flash jolted backwards.

“…Master Allen.” Alfred nodded in a way that conveyed the exact hour of the morning, and how pleased he was to be called up at that hour.

“Er, sorry? Look, I reallyneedtoget intothebatcave. Like, right now.”

“Keep your voice down.” The butler suggested dryly. “The neighbours might hear.”

“The neighbours are like fifty hundred –ohright. Anyway thisisreallyimportant please letmein.” He phased through the door.

“It appears you have let _yourself_ in.” That was either humour or a reprimand. Or both. Alfred closed the door. “I assume that this is related to the reason Master Bruce was called out of the house at such an early hour?”

“Yup Icanjokearound later just please Batcaveletmein.”

“Follow me.” No more hidden remarks or implications, just business.

Bart restrained himself from searching the house top to bottom and trailed along, darting ahead and behind the striding butler in a display of nerves. When Alfred stopped to fiddle with a grandfather clock, he sighed impatient, but the quick look of reprimand hit him just as the thing whirred in a way no clock ever whirred, and slid aside to reveal a lift.

He zipped into it. “Thank you. Seriously, this is crash of you.”

“I shall take that statement in the way I am sure it was meant.” Pressing something else on the clock made the doors start to slide shut. “Whatever is going on, I wish you all the best, Kid Flash.”

The lift started down before he could say anything else. Slow, slow, so slow, but Bart appeased himself trilling his fingers against the side of the wall as he waited. The two hundred and eleventh one in the sequence, that was what he was up to now. Soon he would lose count and have to start all over again. Five-five-eight-three-five-zero-seven-three-two-nine-five-three-zero-zero-four-six-five-five-three-six-six-two-eight-zero-eight-six-five-eight-five-seven-eight-six-six-seven-two-three-five-seven-two-three-four-three-eight-nine. At the speed of any ordinary human, tapping out the digits of the sequence would have taken ages, but with the potent mix of nervousness, excitement and newly produced adrenaline Bart was on, normal speed wasn’t _quite_ what he was operating at.

The lift opened up before he could begin the two hundred and twelfth number, and he stepped out. The Very Big Screen and its computers didn’t have what he wanted, but he checked them for a map or perhaps a note explaining that the cave was sorted by the dewey decimal system. It didn’t give him anything. That left either searching through the place the old fashioned way or going back up in the dreadfully insipid lift to talk to Alfred (didn’t the cave have _stairs_?!).

He started to work his way through. The room with all the bataraangs was easy enough to discount, but so much of everything else was in boxes or crates or suitcases. Surely all the alien equipment had been put away together, so he only had to peep into every fifth box, but there were still an awfully immense number of containers. The trophy room was no help either, because while he found some equipment from off planet, it was stripped down to a shell. And he couldn’t use shells; he wanted the innards of the things.

Bart hit the jackpot in a section that looked especially cave-y. With the boxes covered in water-proof tarpaulin and real stalagmites growing up from the floor, he finally spotted a label from the Reach energy drink, and torn the crates apart. Delving into them, it was mostly useless. He recognised a newer addition, the little alien computer screen he’d brought back from Bialya, now labelled as a translator with instructions attached, and the additive from the Reach drink. While they were interesting and all of that, both weren’t weapons he could use right now. But in the fourth box he uncovered, success.

The communicators that the Reach used, equipment from the science labs, and underneath it, right at the bottom and packed away, a valuable find. A Reach pod, complete and untouched from what Bart could see on the outside. He hauled it out, and turned it over to clunk face down on the floor. The back of it had panels and plug holes and other things to be hooked up to power supplies, because the batteries on the pods were frankly shit for sustained power output. They were designed to send and keep a human unconscious, but for anything beyond that initial shock of energy and then the pulses designed to stop a brain from wanting to wake up, the pods needed to be plugged in to something else. However, a shock of initial energy and then continuing pulses was _exactly_ what Bart needed.

There had to be a set of tools somewhere around. Bart dashed off, choosing to go sniffing through the area devoted to the Batmobile and its engines rather than going back to a cave-wide search. A car repair toolkit had everything he needed.

Taking the toolkit back to the pod, he jimmied open the panel on the back that lead to the battery. Bart removed the little circular design and went rummaging for wires. Halfway through, he remembered that the battery could probably do with a charge, so he went back to the car section of cave and stole the emergency charger from its stores. After that, the wires caught his attention again and he levered up another section of panel, exposing more circuits and a piece of metal that he thoughtfully tucked away. The alien computer screen was also unexpectedly picked up from the first box when he decided its broadcasting gear would be useful.

Without a clock, his own hunger, or anyone normal to tell the time for him, Kid Flash didn’t know how long it took to finish the construction of the little weapon that Artemis had gone on about when he’d asked for stories. It wasn’t something he’d ever thought of making before, but the internet was a wondrous thing, it all made sense, and if he was honest, he wasn’t exactly unpractised to learning something new under high pressure situations. He was taking it on faith that it would work. Systems could be fixed, but the data on them couldn’t. That was what he was counting on. He grabbed a bag; something small and innocuous with a dozen bataraangs embedded in the stitching, and left the mess behind him. No time to clean up. If the League hadn’t wasted time looking for him, they’d already be nearing Santa Prisca. If he was going to do something, he had to do it soon.

Running straight down a tunnel without turning into the maze on either side brought him out onto the streets in an odd place, blurring through the metal door to the outside world, but at least it brought him out. Kid Flash ran out of Gotham, realised he’d run out the wrong way, and circled the city to head south, building up speed as he went, crossing out onto the ocean and using the space that the water gave him to accelerate.

He didn’t know what speed he got up to, but Santa Prisca came up through the lenses of his goggles fast. The island was in chaos. The drug smugglers were in the middle of evacuating, a couple of bullets that had been shot into the air hanging motionless in front of his eyes. One of the Green Lanterns was busy shooting green disks at their heels. He left the criminal herding to the intergalactic police officer, and ran off to see what was going on over the rest of the island. If he was lucky, most of the fighting would be over already.

He wasn’t lucky. The billow of Batman’s cape hung suspended at the speed Bart was going; Batman himself crouched over a tunnel hacking a lock. Superman was engaged in a battle of laser eyes with Blank Manta, and both Hawks were wheeling in the air beside him, knocking over troopers left right and centre. Up on a rise, Deathstroke was taunting Icon and Green Arrow, managing to fight both and neither at the same time. Wonder Woman was smashing her way through a submarine down on the beach, and Bart took a large piece of wreckage from her efforts to leave it lying on the water.

Batman was still busy hacking. Bart slowed himself down further and found a place to put his backpack full of goodies. Removing the little alien handheld screen, he spared a moment to be sincerely thankful that it could translate to English, among all the other stuff. Even better was the setting that turned the writing to English, because the math on it checked out as something he could understand, but being able to read the writing was useful too. He popped the little thing into the compartment of his glove and put the backpack most of the way through a bush, covering it up with leaves.

A boom in the distance caught his attention and he jerked up. Under the speed of sound, then. He went to see what was going on, slowly taking himself back the speed of reality. Batman would need time to hack the door. The door needed to be hacked before the backpack could go boom. Until then he could make himself useful.

The explosion was caused by Bane, Bane who was being forced back by Superman as Black Lightning took over against Manta. He watched, curiously, until he’d decided that yes, the pipes leading into Bane’s head were the things giving him all that extra muscle. Before he could do anything with that information, the second Green lantern swooped down and picked the drug runner up and ran with him. The pipe seemed like a pretty fundamental flaw in Bane’s strength, but Kid Flash wasn’t exactly going to go over and tell him that.

Unneeded, he stepped backwards into the forest. When he backtracked, Deathstroke was still up against Green Arrow and Icon. Feeling petty, Bart stole his sword on the way past. He ended up around head height above the entrance to the tunnels and the underground complex. Checking over the edge, Batman was gone, and the door stood open. Jumping down, Kid Flash landed on the soles of his feet and twisted, using the momentum to keep going and accelerate into the warren. Time to rescue someone he’d much rather leave behind.

Well, something.

Red Tornado was a person. The scarab was, frankly, annoying. The Brain was a _thing_. An it, something that had been so bad when it’d been human that taking its brain out and putting it in a see through box hadn’t improved it _or_ made it worse. Bart could have been biased. The Brain was trying to steal and use his creation, burn it and twist it and break it like the pristine forests that were cut down for furniture and firewood on the edge of the Amazon. He wouldn’t let that happen. But he also couldn’t in good conscience knowing kill the thing. So a rescue mission. Fan-fucking-tastic.

The underground hallways weren’t as maze-like as he’d feared. Being shoved through them while half-awake, drugged, or terrified probably had something to do with that, but for whatever reason, Bart found an elevator fairly easily. It wasn’t the one Deathstroke had taken him through. While that had purely been for people, this was much larger, and less of an enclosed box than it was a platform that lowered itself into the ground. Not the most subtle way of getting in, but he was on a schedule, and the crashes from outside meant that everyone in the complex would already know that shit was going down.

It descended slower than he was comfortable with, a sluggish, creaking pace that sent Kid Flash scurrying to the corner and belatedly poking his chest, sending yellow and red obtuse colours into what passed for camouflage.

The caverns were in chaos. Knocked over carts and abandoned coffee mugs laid a trail showing where Manta’s troopers had been, but with them outside and in the process of being quite thoroughly beaten up, the scientists were panicking. Over to Bart’s right, the lift he’d first been brought down in was crammed full, people in lab coats beating on the door as they tried to squeeze just one more person in for the trip upwards. Others were crouched behind their desks, bracing like the airplane staff told you to do if you were crashing, which the speedster found a little odd, because underground was about as far as you could get from an out of control aircraft.

He wasn’t that interested in them. The League would round them up and they’d get a slap on the wrist and either get absorbed further into Lexcorp or never touch the company again. It wasn’t a new routine, and they weren’t the thing he was after.

Monsieur Mallah was visible from a long way off, his furry bulk looming above the flimsy partitions that divided the space up into sections. Unlike the scientists, who had summarily abandoned their prized work, the gorilla was bent over a bench, picking something up.

Without a shred of regret, Bart darted in and lifted the sheet of varied metal from the gorilla’s meaty paws. The surface was warped and discoloured from what it had been the last time he’d seen it, and it was funny to think that that had only been the previous day, but neither of those things stuck out as all that fascinating as he whipped the heavy piece of scrap through the air and whacked it down hard on the side of the ape’s temple. With a thud, and a rather bemused expression, the gorilla crumpled, knocked out cold.

The bench that the flea-infested animal (alright, so he wasn’t very happy with the creature, didn’t mean it wasn’t true) had been bent over had something else on it, something that he recognised from the brain’s monologuing superior sounding interrogation. Kid Flash picked up the bruised and broken shard of the machine that had sent him to the past, feeling almost nostalgic.

“Do not move.” The whine of weapons powering up.

He tucked the piece of his time machine into the compartment of his right glove, and turned around, plastering an easy smile on his face that broadcasted camaraderie and fun. “Hey dude. Everything crash?”

 “Insolent pest.”

“So you’ve noticed the Justice League storming your base then? Very observant.” He leapt forward. While the thing packed a punch and had any sort of gadget it could want, they were all designed to be able to disconnect and unattach themselves, probably for repair or to swap things out for more useful equipment. It didn’t work in the Brain’s favour. He dropped the pile of weapons on the ground, and tutted at how naked the creepy machine looked without them. “So I’m sure you’ve got threats to get through, but I’m on a time limit. March.”

“I think n-“

“March.” Bart repeated himself coldly. “Or I will drag you, and I promise to cause as much damage to your casing as I possibly can while doing so.”

That got it moving. Unfortunately, it didn’t shut the Brain up. “You should target Savage, not me. He was the one to find your secret and bring you to this place.”

“How loyal you are. No, you’re a…” he tried to think of something, “a hostage, that’s what you are. Faster. To the cargo lift.”

The thing sped up, although regrettably it was able to do that and talk at the same time. He tuned out the thick French accent, and pressed the button to take them up. After an excruciating ride stuck in the same place as a maniac, whose speech he’d lost track of a while ago, they came level with the top floor. The exit beckoned him.

The great thing about his temporary prisoner having wheels, Bart reasoned, was that they let him push the Brain along like an overgrown children’s toy. The world slowed down as he finally got to use some of his speed, and he shoved the criminal out of the tunnels, into the fresh air and the sounds of battle and down to the beach. The large piece of submarine he’d rescued from Wonder Woman’s rage was his target. The Brain wasn’t exactly light, but Bart rolled him onto the wreckage and grabbed a piece of it that jutted out giving him a handhold. From there, he pulled.

He wasn’t used to pulling. Kid Flash wasn’t like the shed dogs that ran on the snow up north. He loved to run, yes, he loved to be free and he worked in a Team and he usually, if not always, followed the orders of his leaders. But he wasn’t transport. Delivery duty was a punishment, not a pleasure. Bart would pull people out of fires and off buildings, he’d yank his Teammates out of the way of an attack in a second, but that was short, that was temporary. He’d never tried to haul someone across water before.

It was difficult. For one, if he slowed down too much, he’d start to sink. And he couldn’t leap across deep furrows in the waves or carve his own path, not with one hand clasped uncomfortably behind his back as the link between the platform of floating metal and the dark grey and red blur that pulled it.

Santa Prisca disappeared over the horizon before he stopped. He kept running, because to return to the speed the rest of the world ran at would be to sink into the choppy sea, but Kid Flash let go of the piece of wreckage and left the Brain floating on it, safely out of range of his cannibalised mess of alien tech and probably, if he cared to listen, still complaining about it. The speeds necessary to run on water and pull while doing so were above the sound barrier, so mercifully, the human brain in its casing couldn’t give him its review of his services. He turned back to land.

Bart overshot the island by a few degrees and had to swerve to correct his course but the green outcrop rising form the ocean was exactly where he left it. Once he was off the water, Kid Flash let himself slow down. He needed to be able to hear things, and adjusting the goggles he had on wasn’t exactly simple to do at high speed either. Sure, it was possible, but getting bugs in his eyes was so not crash, and in the tangled bushes of Santa Prisca he could probably add going head over heels and tripping over a tree root to the list of things against it.

The odd boom echoed, and the crack of bullets bursting from a barrel of a gun still provided an audio backdrop. Giving how quickly Bart was moving, it wasn’t surprising that Blank Manta’s troops were still putting up a fight, and there was always a chance that a drug dealer from the surface had found a gun and started fighting for their cause. A green streak in the sky, rapidly fading, was the only thing he could see in the air, the trail left by one Green lantern or another. The Justice League was definitely making its presence known though, even if they weren’t all looming overhead. He could hear a ripping metallic shriek from one sort of protesting metal or another as the fight continued.

Surrounded by trees in the middle of the wooded area of the island, he wasn’t going to get a front row view of the action. But Kid Flash’s costume gifted him with other ways of monitoring the situation, and he took off his goggles, fiddling with the setting before putting them back up to his eyes. It changed his worldview. The trees and plant life turned see-through, barely there on the screen as a bird perched in the canopy glowed yellow-green under insulating feathers. Night vision let him run on night-ops. Infrared wasn’t useful for travelling, but Bart had learned that it was invaluable, being able to literally look right through objects without a heat signature.

A line of white light so bright it left an afterimage marked a blast of heat vision from Superman. Nothing else showed up white, so at least no one was on fire, and the lack of other lasers suggested that Black Manta had been taken down. Both Hawks with their wings made gigantic splashes of red and yellow on his vision as they tore towards a row of troops from behind, while in front, a figure with its wrists held up must have been Wonder Woman, deflecting bullets that would have killed her colleagues. Bart was just trying to figure out if the blob kicking people in the head was Black Canary or if Green Arrow had decided to go in for hand-to-hand combat when a hand closed over his mouth.

He squeaked, and then gagged. The yelp had opened up his mouth, and the hand clamped over his face smelt foul, like burnt oil and sugar and the taste that lettuce leaves had mixed together. “Quiet now.” The whisper was hushed, next to his ear and almost amused, but the speedster knew that voice.

With the identification came anger enough for him to brave the smell and bite into the hand over his face. Immortal he might have been, but Vandal Savage swore as he jerked his hand away, staggering backwards. Bart started after him, but a blade across his throat made him hiss and stop. “Deathstroke.”

“Good try, brat, but no. Deathstroke’s been taken in by your _friends_ ,” he got sprayed with spit on the last word, “so I’m rather someone else.”

He turned around to glare hatefully at the newest obstacle in his life. She was tall, heavy set with thorn tattoos and armour on her right arm, the edge of which was stuck awkwardly under his chin. “The fuck are you?” Bart made an effort to sound calm.

“Devastation. We’ve met before, but I’ll forgive you the insult under the circumstances.” She greeted him, almost but not quite smiling. “And I have to say, you’ve made a great escape attempt. Not sure how you called in the bastards from their spacestation, but it was a good job. It stops here. Savage says you’re still needed, so I’m guarding you scrawny escape risk ass. Get moving.”

“No.” He turned away from her, not needing to see the smile fall off Devastation’s face. He prowled closer to Savage, who had recovered and looked more than ready to kill Bart, had he not been full of the information the criminal so needed.

He hadn’t expected Vandal to make the first move. The huge man moved surprisingly quickly, darting in his uninjured hand and grabbing Bart’s neck, hauling him up off the ground. “You will regret that.” He promised, simple and sincere in its malice.

“Go fall in a pit and die.” Bart hissed, squirming against the hold, goggles dislodged from his eyes and fallen around his neck.

They moved, Savage holding him as Devastation moved off to flank their side, her head wheeling on alert. If Savage had a plan, maybe Bart, he reasoned, could break it. Into tiny, itty-bitty little pieces. “Ah, yes, so brave you are when you are the one being threatened. I don’t know how you escaped. I don’t know how you managed to get a signal to the Justice League. But for doing that, getting out of your cell and running rampart over this damned island and calling the League down upon our heads, I promise you boy, and this is not a threat, _it is a promise_ , you will regret that.”

“Just so long as I don’t have to taste your hand again,” Kid Flash spat, “what do you bathe in, the sewers?” As he spoke he managed to twist, bringing his legs up and slamming a foot off kilter into his enemy’s face.

Savage snarled, shaking him like a dog would shake a rat and rubbing dirt off his cheek. “Devastation, take the boy. I grow tired of his idiocy.”

He received no reply.

“Devastation.” Savage said again, more cautious. “Devastation?”

A roar came from the jungle. Not a roar from an animal, but the sort of cry that came from a human, leaping into battle. A crash followed it, and Bart thought he could see a treetop quiver with impact. That voice had been Devastation. Someone had found them.

Savage wheeled, and strode away, his hold on Kid Flash’s neck tightening painfully as all talking ceased and he sped up, not quite moving into a jog, half carrying and half dragging Kid Flash along. Bart winced as branches dug into his side, one of them smacking him across the chest and switching his uniform from muted colours to bright yellow and red. Behind them, an echoing screech impacted on the ground, sending tremors Bart could feel in the soles of his boots as he listened to Black Canary’s cry. It was, in his opinion, far more impressive than Devastation’s roar.

The trees ended, and the pounding of the ocean’s waves suddenly got a lot louder without leaves and bushes to muffle it. Actually, the teenager reflected as Savage swung his head left and right, that could have been more because they’d arrived at the shoreline. A steep slope that wasn’t quite a cliff led down to rocks and churning water, with shrubs clinging stubbornly to life and stringy grass on the slanting surface.

“Savage!” The shout didn’t come from him. Savage forced him down to the ground; hand still on the handle of Bart neck.

The immortal’s face wasn’t pleasant on any day, but moulded and shaped by anger it was made very ugly indeed. “Captain Atom. You pitiful-“

“I’ve found him. Them.” Captain Atom spoke into his communicator, stance balanced and ready for a fight.

Savage didn’t get a chance to spout more threats. More members of the League must had been following or with the silver suited Captain Atom, because there was no way, Bart decided, that they’d gotten from the other side of the island that fast. Hawkwoman and Hawkman flew in, along with the Green Lantern that wore a mask, and on a green construct, Batman, Plastic Man, and Black Canary.

Savage was motivated, slightly delusional, and prideful, but even he could see the way things were going. “I have a hostage.” He shouted, edging closer to desperation, holding Kid Flash up and shaking him like a rag doll. It was rather like a theme park ride, but Bart was steadily losing patience.

Black Canary and the others hopped off the green construct, and Hawkman drew back, but the heroes were balanced on their feet, ready to fight. “Put him down.” The combat-instructor for the Team commanded, her voice cold. “I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

“On the contrary,” Savage regained a little piece of his confidence, “I think having a bargaining chip with me is very valuable, wouldn’t you say, Mister Allen?”

The way that the superheroes jerked when Bart’s real name was spoken, you’d think that none of them had heard it before. Well, Plastic Man probably hadn’t, and the two Hawks weren’t exactly known for hanging out with the younger Team, but Bart still thought it was an overreaction. “Let. Him. Go.” The Green Lantern repeated.

From his position above the ground, Kid Flash rolled his eyes. “When has that ever actually worked?”

“Silence!” Savage snarled at him. “I will have safe passage out of here, or the boy-“

“Seriously, has there ever been any villain, ever, who just gave up when anyone told them to? They would make a really bad villain. And a really bad hero, ‘cause we tend to be as stubborn as anything too.” He waved his hands, emphasising his point.

“Be quiet, insolent brat.” The supervillain ordered. “Let your elders see your stupidity, you who thought you could escape me!”

“Very dramatic.” Bart tried to shrug in the position he was in, but couldn’t, stopped by the immortal’s hands. “That is the second time I’ve been called insolent in the last twenty minutes, you need better words.”

“Don’t-“ Captain Atom started, but was interrupted.

“BE SILENT!!” Savage screamed, rotating him so the Bart faced his wrathful, out of control expression.

Green eyes met with the eyes of a tyrant. “No.” Bart said, quiet and faint after Savage’s shout, like they were having a conversation indoors instead of a stand-off on the shoreline. “I refuse to be afraid of you. You are a bully and a coward, and if you release me now, you might even make it off this island.” He hoped that none of the League members watching knew him well enough to recognise the stress in his voice, the elongated words and the lack of contractions as he defied the man who had sent him gasping into a panic attack.

“I’m getting off here.” Growling and raging, like the animal that must have given him the three scars on his face. “And you are coming with me.”

“I’m really, actually not.” He wouldn’t get anything useful out of Savage now. This was just an animal backed into a corner, trying to bargain with the League to find his way out.

Savage would reply with a threat. That was just what he did. Bart, however, was getting pretty tired of both the assumption that he was nothing more than a mouthy sack of meat and the threats. At the moment, he felt only a short way from snapping like Savage was doing, losing all control as the anger and the fear and the mind-numbing concentration he had thrumming through him searched for a way out. Vandal had made his threats. Only one of them mattered, and Kid Flash’s family was safe. Therefore, he was free to act. Bart shuddered, and vibrated out of the meaty paw around his neck. Then he paused, tilted his head, and punched Vandal Savage in the face. When it didn’t work the first time, he did it again, and this time cartilage broke under his fist, and blood spurted out of the criminals nose, bright red standing out against the villain’s dark uniform.

“You thought you’d caught me, didn’t you.” He grinned mirthlessly as Savage launched forward, trying to find humour in the look on Savage’s face, and took a single step backwards out of his range. “You really did, didn’t you? That’s sort of sad. But here’s the thing,” he caught the next move Savage made mid-motion, slowing down the world around him to clamp hands around the immortal’s head and snap up his knee into an already injured face.

“Bart, get back!” Black Canary called, like he was a chick that needed protection.

He raised his eyebrows and repeated himself. “Here’s the thing. If I want you to believe I know nothing about time machines? You will. If I want you to think of me as a weak, easily broken child? By all means, you already buy into that. If I want you to _take as fact_ that _suddenly_ , out of nowhere, I’ve lost the ability to phase through solid matter _just in time for you to take me hostage_?”

“Little BRAT!”

“It’s Bart,” the teenager correctly, sidestepping a punch, “not brat. Difficult to grasp, I know.”

“You _lied_.” It was a hissing, sneering, furious sound of disbelief.

“Don’t sound so surprised.” He skipped backwards again. “I have lied to the Justice League. For _years_. And really, you made it easy. I am just the cargo, right? Just the boy who was sent back, nothing important here, no valuable information. Very helpful.”

A kick hit his side and he coughed with the pain, retaliating with quick combinations of punches that should have winded his opponent. Luck wasn’t on his side. Savage was stronger, much stronger than Bart would ever grow to be. “I will-“

“You won’t do anything.” Bart retreated out of range again. “And you want to know why?”

“Boy-“

“Because over the past three, nowait, thesun’sup, okay, four days, you have collared me. You have drugged me. You have threatened to torture me and starve me and you have locked me in a tiny cell for any time that was left over. You even prompted a panic attack, which, by the way, I am still very embarrassed about, but hey, what could I have done, you found a weak point. You threatened my _family_. You told me how you’d take Jay and Joan and kill them slowly. Are you proud?”

“Very.” Another hit connected with Bart’s shoulder and sent him down, sprawling, as he tried to use the momentum of it to flip back up. He settled for scrambling to his feet.

“Well it is my _turn_.” The seventeen year old replied, leaking defensive anger and a little bit of the viciousness a dog gets after it has been kicked one too many times. “This is my threat. You would go after my family. You would hurt my friends, but my family, them, you would kill. This is me, telling you that if you dare, if you _dare_ , I will return the favour. I will hunt you down. I will kill you.”

He actually laughed at that, Savage, face dripping blood from his nose and balanced in a fight’s stance. “Many have tried. I am Vandal Savage, and I am immortal, child. Do not make promises you cannot keep.”

 “Oh but I can keep it.” Bart countered, retreating backwards again as Savage tried to hit him. If he could hurt the immortal and force his opponent backwards, Kid Flash could kick him off the cliff. Being, well, immortal, Savage would be fine, if a little pissed off. The trouble was that he was too strong; too practiced in combat and too enduring. On the upside, though, Savage himself couldn’t force Bart backwards too far, because the seven League members behind him had stayed out of this so far, but beyond a certain point they’d join their younger ally’s side. Both of them were poking holes at the other’s defences, testing them and defending as their opponent did that same. It wasn’t quite a stand-off, but the balance between them was shifting, favouring one and then the other in a matter of seconds. “That little immortality problem isn’t insurmountable.

“You are immortal now, Vandal, but you weren’t always that way. One day, a long, long time ago, you were a pathetic little caveman looking at a funny rock glowing a strange colour. I think that’s where everything got moded, myself.” He opened up, letting all the conflicting anger and rage and fear that Savage had forced him to feel lie exposed on his face. “Listen well. Should you ever hurt my family. Should you ever send someone to kill them. I will come after you. I will go _back_. I will go back to when you were just an unimaginative little pest lying in your own filth, and I will kill you far, far before that fucking rock falls out of the sky.”

“You don’t have a time machine, boy.” His bravado was faltering, showing cracks in the armour that kept Savage cocooned and safe from words.

Bart struck, levering open those cracks to rip and tear at what was underneath. “I will make another one. I can do that. I _lied_ to you Savage; because I know _everything_ about that machine you are so keen on replicating. I made it. I can make it again.” He took a careful step closer; keeping his eyes fixed on brown counterparts that edged closer to dawning with new knowledge. “If you push me into a corner? If you make this world too unbearable for me to stay in, if you go after the people that I love and subject them to torture and pain? I will do it. Make no mistake, Vandal Savage, for I have done it before.”

“You cannot.” The denial had no weight behind it. The fists that were raised were not tensed to hit him. Bart flashed a quick smile, because body language spoke louder than anything shouted at him.

“I have-“

Power. Red, seething, reflexive power that cut off his warning to his opponent and sent Kid Flash skittering to the shelter the older heroes behind him offered almost before he recognised it for what it was. Klarion had arrived. The witch boy with skin as pale as a cave creature that never saw the light of day held his familiar in his arms, the source of his anchor on the world. The striped cat moved as it saw the forces gathered in front of it, hopping up onto the Lord of Chaos’ shoulder and leaving his hands free for the fight.

“Klarion!” Savage flung out a limb and latched onto the smaller figure with a hand that swallowed up the thin bony little arm, strong, heavy figure towering over the mismatched skinny boyish frame brimming with magic.

“I heard your call. What a beautiful morning!” The witch boy purred as his eyes lost their humanity. “Do we get to play?”

“We have to leave.” Savage was already halfway through the portal as he spoke. “Now, c-“

The rest of the word was cut off by whatever magics saw to his teleportation. Klarion swung his head, confused, but standing against seven League members as explosions and the clatter of dying gunfire heralded the presence of others was not the sort of fight he favoured. It might have been Doctor Fate’s presence on the island, or Savage’s hasty exit, or any number of other factors, but the result was quick. Klarion followed the other member of the Light through the portal, his exit lacking a mocking quip or parting shot as the tunnel collapsed in on itself and the cliff’s edge was left empty.

“The effing hell was that?” Captain Atom started forward, putting Bart behind him as he approached the site of the now-long-gone portal.

“An escape.” A hand gripped Bart’s shoulder.

Kid Flash winced at the grip. “Dude, don’t? I’m still healing from how Savage was holding me. Not crash.”

“No. What is ‘not crash’ is sneaking out of the Watchtower, disappearing, and coming back to this island for revenge.” Batman’s voice was even and controlled.

Black Canary wasn’t as measured. “You do NOT do that!”

“Of course I do!” Bart snapped, and jerked Batman’s gloved hand off him. “You might be here, but this isn’t your fight.”

“Isn’t our FIGHT?! We’ve spent years fighting the Light, th-“

He interrupted her. “Yeah, you have. But this is the place that captured _me_ , this is _my_ technology, _my_ creation, and this makes it. My. Fault.”

Bart turned his back to her speech, and popped open the compartment in his right glove, removing the translator. Once again at his back and out of his sight, Black Canary was silenced, either by her own will or because one of the other Leaguers had intervened. It would have been more gratifying to have set his work off in front of Savage and watched his reaction to the destruction, but even without that poetic justice, it still needed to be done. “My mess.” Kid Flash repeated to himself, stroking a thumb across the tiny screen in his hand. “My problem.”

He hit the broadcast button.

“... What’re you holding?” Hawkman, as least, seemed singularly unconcerned with Bart’s emotional state.

“A very tiny handheld alien translator.” He replied easily enough, wriggling it.

“And why did it just shriek,” the Green lantern turned to his ring, studying it for a moment, “the word ‘on’ in about a hundred different languages?”

Over on the other side of the island, hidden in bushes, the EMP he’d made activated. Bart wondered what sort of sound it made as he answered the Lantern’s question. “It is a detonator.” That was less easy to say, the words sounded odd on his tongue. He wasn’t used to explaining what he did. And the reaction to that explanation had no chance of being positive.

“It’s a WHAT?” Black Canary yelled, stalking towards him. “THE HELL DID YOU DO, KID-“

The shockwave reached them as she spoke, and once again, Black Canary was cut off. Bart sped himself up to run hands through the wave of blue energy, looking at it with wonder and no small amount of astonishment as it pulsed outwards and away from him. It had worked. Artemis had told him the story, she’d told him again and again about the time she and Robin had to fend off Red Tornado’s siblings, but Bart hadn’t ever expected to need the weapon they’d used. It had really, actually worked. He honestly didn’t know how to feel about that. With victory came a lack of any sort of goals, and for the past four days, his world had been entirely and completely focused on this.

Time moved back to what it normally ran at. He sighed in relief and tensed his arms and legs rigid for a moment, not to fight or run, but to stretch them and feel the reports he got back from that. The bruises around his throat were already fading. The scuffs on his boots and the torn holes in his costume where lightning bolt symbols usually stood could be repaired. His family was and would be safe. Even if he was still angry, even if he wanted something to hit and punch and kick and this bloodless sort of triumph didn’t give him that, the EMP had worked, every single bit of the work that had been put into imitating his time machine was now corrupted and stored on computers wiped dead by the electro-magnetic pulse. For the first time since that horrible, arresting moment when he’d known that Savage had found out when he’d come from, Bart could relax.

The strange feeling lasted for approximately five seconds, before green energy wrapped itself around him and he was hauled up, snapping back to watchfulness inside an illuminated green force field as the Justice League looked up at him, their eyes wide and tracking every twitch he made.


	12. Part 11

Bart stood sullenly, shoulders held stiff as he refused to look down at his feet. “Is the ankle clamp really necessary?”

The passage of heroes coming past him off the Zeta tubes and back into the Watchtower’s main room halted. “Yes.” The Martian Manhunter said simply.

The flow of costumed heroes began again, as more spilled out of the row of Zeta tubes behind Kid Flash. Down on the floor below the steps to the tubes, everyone’s eyes were once again fixed on his bright yellow and red self. He didn’t like the feeling of scrutiny. “I must ask.” Aqualad was not at the front of the group, but his height and bearing were that of a leader, not a spectator. He gestured to the green energy construct currently holding Bart down by one ankle, and its connection to the Green Lantern who had made it. “It seems odd to restrain Kid Flash. May I assume this has something to do with why every League member’s communicator’s cut out, with the exception of Batman?”

“Your communicator survived?!” Bart goggled at the Dark Knight. “Dude, what have you put in that _cowl_?”

“Kid Flash is restrained because we don’t know what the hell is going on.” Green Arrow snapped, one of his fingers twitching for want of a bow.

“Kid Flash,” Batman corrected, walking up to assume authority standing next to Aqualad by the suspended screens, “has been restrained because we need answers, and as he proved by his little stunt running out into the Zeta tubes, he can’t be relied on to stay here and talk.”

“Personally,” Hawkwoman flared her wings, intimidation avian style, “I don’t care what his childhood was like. I just want to know how the hell he got back onto Santa Prisca, why he did it, what the shit he threatened Vandal Savage with was and why it was enough to make that coward run, and most of all, what the everlasting fuck he detonated that made that blue ring of energy.”

“Wait a minute,” Tigress glared at him, and Bart smiled sheepishly. “Let me get this straight. He detonated something? As in, a bomb?!”

“We don’t know.” The Green Lantern keeping his leg stuck made a second construct, lifting up the small translator that they’d confiscated off him. “But he used this to do it. It shouted ‘on’ in as many languages as it could.”

“Then every communicator we had was knocked out.” Black Lightning folded his arms, his glare plain on his face even with his mask on.

“You guys do realise I am in the room, right?” Bart smiled again, trying to diffuse the tension aimed at him. “I’d be happy to-“

“Drop the act, boy.” Hawkman wasn’t, for once, standing directly next to his wife, but they both wore the same expressions of contempt. “Do you really think we’ll just let you go? We saw what you did and how you fought on that cliff. I don’t know why we didn’t intervene.”

“I am actually quite glad that you did not.” Slowly, he put the reflexive smile away. Letting the tiredness, the exhaustion and the fear and the irritation and unfulfilled hate that was slowly dying back down into a shimmer at the back of his mind rise to the surface of his expression wasn’t easy. He had spent four years learning to hide behind a smile, and his whole life before that learning to hide behind submission. “This was my fight.”

“It most certainly wasn’t.” Zatanna looked ready to incinerate him.

With a sigh, Bart sat down, pulling his goggles over his head and the gloves off his hands. “Fine. Let me just go get something from home and I’ll-“

“Zeta tube lockdown initiated.” Red Tornado reported.

“I commend you for your thoughtfulness, but curse you for your serendipity in halting my progress,” Bart informed the android dryly.

“You will not be permitted to escape questioning again.” The robot replied with a touch of very human stubbornness.

Kid Flash blinked, and tapped a hand against the green construct still holding his foot. “Barry?”

He hadn’t been tracking where the Flash was, but his mentor appeared instantly, expression a horrible mix of confusion and pain that made Bart’s face twist up in guilt and turn away from direct eye contact. “Bart?”

Eventually, he’d have to maintain eye contact, but he didn’t feel up to it at that moment, preferring to play with the soles of his boots instead. “I need you to get something. A book. It’s under my bed at home, not new at all, a sketchpad. It will help me explain.”

The solid presence behind him hesitated. “You won’t start without me?” The question was childish, said in a vulnerable voice like there was an expectation it would be denied.

“No.” He promised.

A shift of air and understated swirl of light marked his grandfather’s exit. Bart stretched out his arms behind him, looking up at the ceiling.

“So d-“

“No.” The speedster said quietly, not even aware of who the question had come from. “He’s family, and I’ve lied to him. He deserves to know everything.”

The room went quiet after that, quiet for two long minutes just waiting, before someone else spoke up. “Bart you look terrible.”

So the mighty Blue Beetle was finally keen to talk to him. Kid Flash stopped his study of the ceiling, looking down to meet his Teammate’s eyes and pull one side of his face up in a quirk that didn’t even attempt to convey happiness. “Really, Blue? That couldn’t be because I’ve been imprisoned, could it? It couldn’t be because I haven’t had any sleep in the past four days that wasn’t either because I was drugged or because I’d just had a panic attack. Couldn’t be because I had to escape an inhibitor collar using skills that I’d really, really hoped I’d never have to use again. Couldn’t be because I had to deal with the shit on Santa Prisca before it could put anything on mode. It absolutely, positively can’t be because for the past four days, I have had the reality and the world that I helped make threatened by a machine I created. Nah. Couldn’t be.”

“And,” Blue Beetle continued regardless, and Bart rolled his eyes, “you’re doing the stress talking thing.”

“What stress talking thing?” Tigress rounded on him, the line of her body angular and carefully under control.

“The thing he does…” Jaime waved his hand ineffectively. “He’s stopped using ‘I’m’ and now he’s using ‘I am’, that sort of thing.”

“Point for the guy in blue.” Bart saluted him.

“Any reason he’s so sarcastic?” Rocket glanced at him, but most of her attention lay in a corner of the room that Bart wasn’t going to look at. He didn’t want to know how Joan, Iris and Jay were reacting.

“Probably a defence mechanism.” Batgirl guessed.

“Hey, I am right here. I am not meat; you don’t needed to talk like I am not even in the room. And get this ankle thing off me. I am not going to run.”

“I see what you mean about the talking thing.” The Green Lantern holding his tether checked with the other League members before letting it fade away.

Bart made a point of not moving.

No one else asked anything, but they grew closer, crowding the foot of the stairs in a way that made him glad that he was on his own up at the top as he waited for the Flash to return. His grandfather was still the one person in the world who could catch up to him in both quickness of thought and action. Because of that, Bart wondered if he would look through the art book before he handed it over, if he’d even think it a good idea to fetch it at all. For once, he was the one stuck at a normal speed and waiting as someone else ran to bring the one record of his world that he’d created back into his hands.

The Zeta tube beeped, and the Flash condensed from the air, darting out and skidding to a sudden stop just out of arm’s length, his face uncertain. Bart got up from the floor and with careful hands took the book of paintings from his grandfather, glancing down at it, before with no small amount of disquieted nervousness meeting Barry’s eyes. “Thank you.”

“Anything.” It was a burst of noise too fast for anyone else to understand, and in that speed the word was made private. Bart closed his eyes, briefly, as he felt the warmth of a larger hand on the back of his head, a quick gesture of comfort before Barry stood back. The Flash didn’t go far, hovering on the other end of the steps, not making his way down to join the rest of the crowd.

“You are being remarkably calm about all this.” He said into the silence, thumbing over the spine of the pad of paper and paintings he held.

Bart didn’t expect the voice that contradicted him. “We aren’t,” said Iris Allen, “but we need answers.”

The part of him that instinctively countered with jokes and sarcasm wasn’t working properly. “…I’ll give the League what they want first.” The teenager said finally. “I think you are all more worried about the bomb thing then the other shit.”

“That might be a good place to start off at,” Captain Marvel intoned sarcastically, “yeah.”

“Fine.” Without any more warning, he began. “So the Light figured out I am from the future and they captured me, because they are trying to build their own time machine like it is the sort of thing you can buy in a box from Ikea, which, by the way, totally wrong. They assumed I was an idiot, like you all do, and that I was only a passenger. Really, I made the time machine, but don’t tell them that. Savage threatened my family so I had to give them some answers, but I made them as useless as possible.”

“I’m sorry,” the Green Lantern who had been in charge of keeping him down held up a hand. “Did you just say you built the time machine?”

“Yes, astonishing, I know, shut up. If I don’t say this now I think I’ll go back to running.” He twitched. “Anyway I broke their collar, got Jay and Joan and Iris and the kids to safety, and I kindasortofreally wanted Savage to pay for threatening them. So I got Flash to call in the League. Then you guys backed me into a corner and I blurted out things that should not be blurted out and ran through the Zeta tubes, we all caught up here, we all understand?” Bart didn’t wait to see if there were any protests, still directing his explanation to a point above the crowd’s heads. “Good.

“So after the Watchtower I scavenged some technology and built an EMP. You can make one pretty easily but I’m more used to working with Reach technology rather than human so yeah, crash, that’s what I used. Then I took it and hopped on over to Santa Prisca and put the EMP in a bush, and I evacuated the Brain because he’s a computer. Than Savage got me and I ended up fighting him but he got away before I could set off the EMP in his face. Which is sad. And that’s what happened.”

“…What the hell is a EMP?” Static asked quietly. His voice sounded a little dazed, but Bart was used to that, that was what happened when he tried to explain something. Words started to run together and blur into a big mess. He’d never make a good public speaker.

“ElectroMagnetic Pulse.” The Atom explained from the side lines. “Knocks out every sort of electronics temporarily.”

“This one isn’t temporary, sorryaboutthat, didn’t think about your communicators but I would do much worse to make sure no one duplicates the time machine and fucks up the time stream or anything like that because that would literally end this reality so it’s quiteimportant that it doesn’t happen. Batman has got to have some reallyreally good shielding in his cowl thing for it not to work on him.”

“What’s up with your speech?” Rocket frowned.

“Gone past thestageof really formal slow talking, now nearingpanic and a continuous stream of words.” Bart recited, rattling the response off like a contestant on a quiz show. “Anything else you’d like answers for? I’ve answeredaboutthe bomb, is this over, can I maybepossiblyplease go home?”

“Bart?”

“I’dreallyliketogohomenowandeatmaybesleep-“

“Bart.” Hands shook him gently, a face that hadn’t been in front of him half a second before filling his vision. “Bart, Bart, it’s okay. It’s okay, you hear me, it’s okay.” Hands pulled him forward into a hug. Bart endured it stiffly, locking up into a resistant board of teenaged defensiveness. Barry kept him like that, and turned his head to talk to the other senior League members. “Do we really need everyone here?”

“What do you mean?” Batman’s harsh tone wasn’t accommodating.

“You know it was an EMP now. There’s got to be some way you could check. Just… most of you don’t spend any time with Bart.” He was tucked against his grandfather’s chest like a child. Ridiculous. Bart squirmed, trying to get out, even trying to phase himself, and Barry had to stop what he was saying to hold on to him and match his vibrations. Kid Flash subsided eventually, glaring at the red fabric in front of his face, and the Flash continued. “You don’t know him, and this doesn’t really affect you. So if it doesn’t, get outta here. This is hard enough already without a huge audience.”

“Get off me.” He mumbled.

“Nope.”

Someone said something that was muffled by the arms that enclosed the teenager, but it must have been an agreement. A few seconds later, the sound of movement from a diverse collection of heroes reached Bart’s ears, and the computer called out names as some left through the Zeta tubes, others going through the doors out of the centre room to other floors of the Watchtower.

When Barry finally released him, Bart glared daggers at his mentor for a short second before turning back to the crowd. The rather less crowded crowd. Most of the mentors of the Team, Batman and Wonder Woman and their ilk had stayed, but the rest of the Justice League was gone. That severely lowered his options for people to talk at. Intellectually, Bart knew he’d have to meet the eyes of someone from the Team sooner or later. He still wasn’t looking forward to the prospect.

“I’m not a child.” The speedster told Barry, recovering his glare for his mentor.

Something unsure flickered across his grandfather’s face before it disappeared. “I know.”

“I might not have ever been one, by the standards of your world.” Bart warned.

“I think that’s looking… yeah.”

“Do you still want me to explain?”

“Yes.” That vague hope died where it stood. Bart sighed, but privately agreed. The Flash, more than anyone else, had a right to know what his descendants had been getting up to.

Something in him gave up. They were doing this, whether he wanted it or not, and that fact that he very much did not want it would make no impact on things. The League needed answers. The Team deserved to know what he had kept from them. “I’ve never really told you what my home was like,” he tried. “There’s a reason for that. Sure, I told you about Blue Beetle and why it was so very important to take him off mode. I haven’t elaborated past that.”

He walked –not running, not darting or zipping- down the stairs to the clearing where leaders were supposed to prepare information around their missions, needing the screens there for a very different purpose. Bart set a camera to magnify the object in his hands, the sketchbook, and put the enlarged image up on a floating window in the air, making sure it was working before opening the book to its first page.

The old half completed pencilled figures that the first owner of the book left took up that page. “I don’t get it.” Superboy spoke up, understandably a little puzzled.

“You will.”

The next two pages were his first attempts with that crappy pencil, almost four years old. He flipped past them, too, until Bart found the first drawing. It wasn’t by any means a good one. The anatomy was off and the shading made the light look like it shone from two different places at once, never mind that there’d never been any light that strong in that time anyway. But the portrait was clearly one of a Reach Guard, poking an undetailed human with a spear.

“Wh-“

“The guards had all the power.” Bart said softly, tracing the line of the spear with one finger that showed up on the huge screen floating in front of him. “Some were actually nice. Some were horrible. Most of them just didn’t care.”

“You made pictures…” Black Canary said wonderingly.

The rust haired teenager nodded in affirmation. “There is a reason you have not seen this particular art book before.” He tapped the surface of the page, feeling the pads of his uncovered fingers run across the imprint his pencil had made on the sheet of paper. “I’ve had this book for four years. Picked it out of the clutter in the basement less than a month after the invasion was stopped.”

The first bits were mostly him learning to draw, he explained. After that, when he’d learned to paint he put the practices from that in his other books. Newer ones, ones with paper that was actually meant for painting on. That sort of thing. The book he was showing them got the drawings he never wanted anyone else to see. It was as much of a record of the time he came from as anything else was. His time machine was destroyed, and he was not unhappy about that. It was not something he want anyone else to have access to. The costume he wore when he came back was made to blend in with them all. It didn’t have anything on it or in it that might tell his Teammates anything.

The only other thing he’d brought back with him was for Neutron, Bart continued, uncaring that most of the room wouldn’t recognise that name. If they tried hard enough, they’d find it in the records. His device cut off Neutron’s powers for good, and he couldn’t help the hint of pride that crept into his voice at the declaration. Nathaniel was free of the powers that he’d endured, not enjoyed.

“The technology my scarab picked up…”

“Yeah, Blue. My fault. Sorry about the false alarm. Your bug is right, by the way.” He kept his voice calm and even, keeping control of it and making sure the words didn’t slur or speed up. “It was Reach technology originally. We modified it to put his powers on mode forever.”

“We?” Batgirl, as ever, pounced on his tiny slip-up.

“I’ll explain.” Bart promised, meeting her eyes and then quickly flinching away from them. At some point eye contact was going to have to happen. At some point. “Can I sit down?”

“Why?” Oh, he wasn’t fond of the mistrust in that tone. He deserved it, yeah, but he still bristled at it, glaring at Wonder Woman irrationally.

“Because I, as I _might_ have said, haven’t slept in three days, I have only _just_ got mypowersback from the fucking collar, and thisis going to take a while. You’reaskingfor the story of myentireworld, it is NOT goingtobe QUICK.” The speedster snapped, guiltily enjoying the way the Amazonian backed down.

No one else objected to it out loud. Aqualad even sat down in front of him, starting a trend with his Teammates. Bart tried to ignore the voice telling him to play for more time. He could actually do it. He could draw everything out, give them only snippets and little teasers until they either thought they had enough or gave up on him. He could find a way to get out of the Watchtower, run away if not by Zeta tube, than by pleading with the bio-ship.

Doing that would be cowardly. It would lose him any chance of getting any trust thrown his way. His friends would, quite understandably, hate him for lying to them and leaving them without an explanation for it. Using the book of art was the easiest way to do it he could think of. He could tell the stories behind the paintings, and he could do it while looking at the floor, or just the book. It would stop them from asking any questions. He wouldn’t have to rummage through all his memories to choose the choice ones to drag up into daylight. Nothing about exposing his past, their future-that-would-never-happen, would be easy. This was just the easiest road to run down out of the paths available to him that he was willing to take.

The tracking software he’d commanded to follow the book worked better than he’d expected it to, keeping zoomed in on the guard sketch as the book wobbled and shifted when he sat down, legs crossed underneath him. Bart hunched over the pad of paper, back bent in defensive posture that could do absolutely nothing to help him, and started turning pages.

More sketches past on screen, some never quite finished, most just practises, trying to draw people and get their head right or make a tree that wasn’t oddly symmetrical. He went through ten or twelve pages before he found one that was worthy of stopping on and explaining. His first watercolour, pastel shades showing a woman with her head thrown back, frozen in the middle of laughing. “I wish she’d gotten to be this happy more.” Bart absentmindedly flattened a crease in the page. “She didn’t get to have fun much. And our world was never this sunny, either.”

The Justice League were keeping their distance, not looming, retreated to near the windows of the room. Around him, the Team sat on the floor, and it really helped not to have them crowding him. They were the people who needed to hear everything, but he didn’t want closeness and company. This was just them, sitting on the floor, an informal briefing prompted by circumstances outside his control. The only exceptions were somewhere behind him out of his sight. The corner where the Flash family had been was empty now. They had to be with Barry, and Barry was behind him, and Bart wasn’t going to check whether he was right or not.

Before anyone could get around to asking the obvious question lurking in the room, he answered it. The painting was of his mother, Bart offered up. Yes, his mother, because as a general law humans needed two sources of DNA for reproduction. All anyone ever asked him about was his father, but he’d had a mother too. And he loved her. She loved him. Nothing out of the ordinary or weird, save for the circumstances she’d had to raise him in.

He’d forgotten how much he liked that painting. How often he’d flipped back past work that was better made and better thought out to look at the laughing woman on the page. The paper was worn, even, around the edges; corners rounded off and full of creases made by the manhandling. Bart’s lips lifted up just slightly, absorbing the comfort he could get from seeing her face.

He turned over to the next page. It was just his old sleeping roll, so Bart kept on going, flipping past a painting of some food to a pencil drawing of some of the electronics the slaves had been used to transport. They had been heavy, heavy and bulky and not easy to carry, but also useful. Useful, Bart clarified, because their parts had been used for some of the time machine, wiring and circuits and panels torn from them and cannibalised to make a machine completely unlike what the electronics were made for. None of that particular technology had ever made its way to Earth in the current timeline. It was used for administration, not battle.

Superboy was confused. The half-kryptonian wanted to know why people hadn’t fought back or refused to work. Bart lost the smile he’d gained from his mother’s portrait. When he said that the planet was enslaved, he replied in as gentle a manner he was able to summon up without screaming, he really did mean that everyone, on the planet, had been forced into slavery. He hadn’t intended it to be a metaphor.

He turned away from the electronics. The next few pages didn’t have anything interesting, as he paused for a second to look at the picture of a fire in the night, unfinished and made from watercolours before he’d learnt oil painting. He found the first picture done in pen, back when he hadn’t quite gotten the hang of cross hatching, a sea of blank faceless people depicted on the page. Bart stopped on the page after that. It was a picture of the sky, vague smudges of grey and tiny falling things that weren’t snowflakes.

This was what the sky looked like, he said, tracing the falling patterns with a finger and watching as his hand came up on the floating screen. There had always been clouds everywhere. The most sunlight or blue sky they’d see would be in patches at best. The stars were an uncommon sight, normally hidden behind grey blanketing coverings. The clouds had rained and snowed, but mostly what they gave the ground below them had been ash. Trying to make a joke, Kid Flash pointed out that he still didn’t try to catch snowflakes on his tongue, the memory of something far more bitter tasting keeping him from trying it.

“Wouldn’t that make growing food impossible?” Red Robin suddenly ducked his head, apparently realising that he’d said that out loud. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s a good question.” Bart reassured him. “I don’t know how they did it. Either the Reach did something to the crops, made them grow big like they did with the food from the Lexcorp farms for their Reach drink, or maybe it was just the area I was in. I didn’t travel about.”

“W-where did you live?” This time Red Robin kept his eyes on him, and Bart was the one who suddenly found the ceiling interesting.

“Somewhere on the East coast. When I was nine I was moved to a camp in the ruins of Mount Justice.” He smiled sunnily before anyone could exclaim over that. “When the time machine brought me back, it moved in time, not location.”

Moving with a calm he didn’t feel, he started going through the book again. Bart already knew which picture he’d have to talk about next. He found it in the next few pages, a strange, light, scattered thing painted from some of the lightest watercolours he had. It didn’t give a clear picture. The lines only hinted at having an intelligent design behind them, not revealing what the design might have been. Bart traced the shapes and strokes of the brush with his fingers, outlining eyes, a nose and a mouth as he tried to find a way to begin.

“It’s a person.” Tigress announced, and he nodded, knowing the she’d see that motion even if he couldn’t see her. “Is that…”

Bart cut her off before she could get the wrong idea. “It is not Wally. You might see the family resemblance though. This is my dad.”

“Don…” He heard Iris’ murmur.

“Not your son. My father. They are going to be very, very different people.” He took a deep breath. “If anyone attempts to hug me, I will punch them. Then I’ll Zeta back down to the surface.”

Bart had been nine, he side, starting the story. Nine and skinny and going through a growth spurt when the scientists had visited his camp. Children had been taken, apparently at random, and he was one of them. Taken, but not snatched. If someone snatched something that meant it wasn’t already theirs to do what they liked with, and the meat was very, very much already the Reach’s playthings. The children had been lined up and made to drink something.

Here, he paused. Background information was needed. He skipped off track to give his audience the details they required. The Light had neutralized the additive that the Reach had been planning to feed to the human race to dumb them down and make them creatures not far beyond cattle. No one knew how the Light had done so, but whatever they did stuck. Humans failed to be made stupid by the combination of happy chemicals and adrenaline inhibitors that additive contained. However, there was one thing the additive was still useful for. The marker it contained for tracing Meta-genes wasn’t affected.

He didn’t know how his father and aunt had gotten out of taking the drink when they were younger, Bart revealed. They’d been born in a time when there were still resistance movements. With help, Iris could have hidden them.

He wasn’t hidden. When he drank the liquid brimming with additive, he’d lit up the scientists’ equipment like a solar flare. The response was inevitable. He was slated to be transferred for research. His father had to have known that there was nothing he could do to stop them. His dad tried anyway.

The reaction was quick and brutal. A guard had stabbed his father through the stomach, all that way through his abdomen. His father had fallen. An older boy who was being taken with Bart had pulled him back and stopped him from attempting to go see, trying to help. He’d held Bart against his chest as Bart cried, and Kid Flash couldn’t remember his name. That had been the last time he’d seen his parents.

“Then… maybehecould’vebeenfine?!” The Flash blurted.

Bart rounded on him, twisting around from his seat on the ground to glare, anger making it temporarily so simple to meet his grandfather’s eyes. “The second you see a normal human recover from being impaled on a metal STICK through his stomach, THEN WE’LL TALK!” He snapped, mouth half lifted in a snarl.

Barry looked like he’d been hit over the head with a blunt object. Belatedly, Kid Flash remembered that they were talking about the man’s son, and flinched away from the expression, turning back around to hover over the art book. He ran his hands through his hair, tugging slightly, and the sensation was real and calming enough to get his voice back to normal. There were other things to talk about. Other pictures to explain.

“Meat that survived the process of activating their powers had collars put on them and were kept in a different camp.” He finished. “That’s why I was moved.”

Next page. Next page, next page, he’d spent too long on his father’s picture anyway; he didn’t want to look at it anymore. He reached the first big oil painting he’d put in the book. Dark, looming background, with clouds that were ships or ships that were clouds descending out of fog. A city that was more rubble than building, and a glow, a green glow narrowing down to four specks of light raging against the darkness.

The Green Lanterns had been forbidden from coming back to the planet, but they’d come anyway. They even brought an ally, a monstrous purple dog with jutting fangs who fought with them against the assembled might of the Reach’s fleet of starships. Most of the ships had been destroyed defending the planet against the War World, but every last one that had survived that event had been sent after the four Lanterns making their stand on the west coast.

He told the fairy tale like it had been told to him, from the old people who remembered it to the small child over a campfire. The huge battle that had happened. The blazes of green light that had obliterated entire ships in their wrath. The way four beings, just four, only backed up by their rings and their willpower, had taken down ship after ship after ship, until finally as the last stragglers tried to take on the Green Lanterns flaming rage, the Reach had been forced into using the War World itself. They’d been forced into incinerating their own ships in the fight to stop the Lanterns.

Someone asked him what happened.

“They died.” Bart said, pointing out what was both obvious and inevitable. “No one could have survived that. Of course they died.”

He moved on to the next page as the room went oddly quiet. Not that it hadn’t been quiet before. But this was stillness as well as quiet, this was not respectful. If he had to call it something, he’d call it frightened, or wary, or shocked. One of those things. The next page showed the fall of the last kryptonian.

Trying his best to feel nothing but numbness, he moved into that story, and then the next, and the one after that. The Light showing their hand and betraying their partners, with far too little and far too late. The first attempts to negotiate with the invading force, and the scenes afterwards as the Reach came and conquered the lands anyway, heedless to any promises made or bargains wrought. Wonder Woman, Red Robin and both Martians, all dead by a bomb too big to dodge from the orbiting weapon the Reach controlled. The rest of the Bat family, grieving and slipping into hiding to plot and plan and strike back, Red Hood returned from the dead and passed over by Bart in as few a words as possible.

He didn’t have stories for everyone. Aqualad and Tigress never returned from their undercover mission, Kaldur’s betrayal something that the world continued to believe was true for long after the destruction of Blank Manta’s forces. The Team, who were covert operatives, did not get such messy and public executions as the League. Most simply vanished, an anonymous body among thousands of others. Some slipped away to join resistance networks before the Reach turned their attention to those and hunted them out like a ferrets in a rabbit warren.

Washington DC had not lasted long, as either a city or a symbol. The Hall of Justice had been damaged in this timeline, but Bart showed the room a picture of what had been thrown at it in his history. Literally thrown. The Watchtower had been hurled out of Earth’s orbit and send like a guided missile, straight onto the Hall. Bent and blood stained rubble and metal was the result, as the building bled into on another until there was no way of telling what had come from where.

His throat was dry. Someone, someone red and metallic and clunking handed him water, and food that suggested that the time was closer to lunch than breakfast. Bart appreciated how useful having an emotionless machine around sometimes could be, and thanked Red Tornado before he progressed to the next page.

This was just depressing. Still, Bart couldn’t have skipped the next one. The picture, when he turned the page, was put down in oil paints, like most of the disheartening stuff. Red energy flaring up in the distance, a skeleton on the ground with bones that were scorched close to being charcoal, and a young man in the foreground pulling on the red hood of the Flash. “So…” Bart said carefully, but there wasn’t really a tactful way to put it. “Barry died. Wally became the Flash. Chronologically speaking this is thefirstthing that happened. The second Flash died on the day I arrived back in the past. Woo-hoo, prevented that, I’msoclever.” Really not a happy tone of voice, that. He tried to sound more pleased about saving Barry’s life. That was the sort of accomplishment you were meant to coo over and be proud of and frame on your wall. “So that’s the main reason I arrived when I did. Movingon? Good?”

“Nope!” Too cheery and too bright and too energetic. Bart’s ear was grabbed and twisted, forcing him to turn around and face Iris Allen, who was wearing a very chilling smile on her face.

Huh. Was that what he looked like, plastering cheery imitations of a grin on his face? He hoped not. It made his grandmother looked maniac rather than calm. Bart liked to think he was better at lying than that, even if he had inherited an instinctive desire to smile whenever things went drastically on mode. He tuned out of whatever Iris was saying to vibrate out of her clasp and stand up. Then he took hold of one of her shoulders, swivelled her around, and pushed her toward Barry. She could aim that concentrated rage at her husband, not him.

He turned back around, and sat down again. Tigress was staring at him. Well, not Bart. The art book he had in his lap, and the man in the art book. She wasn’t going to say anything. But she was staring.

Wally, he elaborated, had taken on the responsibilities of the Flash for five years. After that, he’d been killed too. He hoped that didn’t hurt the hero he’d half adopted into his family, who’d taught him to snark and told him the stories of the early days of the Team and given him the inspiration to copy Wally and make an EMP to get rid of his troubles. It would almost certainly hurt her. But he hoped it wouldn’t hurt her too much.

The next drawing was done in pen, and unfortunately didn’t have a story behind it that he could share, owing to secret identities and the way everyone still thought Jason Todd was dead. Unfortunate because he really could have used the distraction from the last picture. Red Hood perched with a gun in his hands, while Batman crouched in the shadows, unmasked but with his face hidden by darkness.

In terms of a timeline, he really hadn’t put the book together properly. Things that had happened days before he got send back sat next to things that had happened straight after the Reach revealed their full might and the deaths of heroes were drawn in right beside a picture of the food line with people queuing to get the day’s meal. Red Hood and Batman together came just before a drawing that explained why Batman dropped the mask.

It was coloured in from one of many photos he’d seen. The Reach had valued symbols. They spent so much time building Blue Beetle up as one before the on mode puppet had been exposed as a spy. They put value on the ideals heroes could represent to people, and that was the main reason that heroes had been hunted, Bart  noted. Without humanity’s best and brightest shining in the sky, people lost hope.

That was why the Batcave had been broken into. It had taken years after they’d officially gained control over the planet, but eventually with creeping certainty, the Reach unmasked Batman. They unmasked Batman and his children, and then they drilled into the Batcave and tore it up, taking photos to show the populace what had become of their figureheads. Oddly, while the children raised and taught by the Dark Knight and the man himself had gone unmoving, faces going expressionless in perfect demonstration of their often annoying synergy, no one else seemed to get it.

Right. He couldn’t imagine that very many people were allowed to see the cave. “Batcave.”

“Batcave.” Bart repeated, drawing his hand over the dried pigment on the paper. “It is why they have all frozen, look at them.” He gestured toward the Batman’s apprentices, and the Dark Knight himself. “The Reach shouted this victory from the rooftops. They were really very pleased with themselves. They got the Batcave, but more importantly, they uncovered Batman’s identity, and the identity of all his children. Nightwing, Red Robin, Red- Ora-. Okay. So I can’t tell you the last ones.”

“Did you just say Red Robin twice?” Cassie looked far too shrewd.

“Next picture.” Blue Beetle was raw, and his voice was accented so much that it already sounded like he was speaking Spanish.

He was going to have to spend so much time convincing Jaime that none of the paintings were his fault, Bart just knew it. Now wasn’t the time. He could knock some sense back into Jaime later. “Next picture.” He agreed.

He showed them the sketch of an inhibitor collar. Each tiny part had been labelled, the insides of the mechanism complicated and customized, but recognisably still related to the sort he’d gotten out of a few... no wait, a day… no wait. Early that same morning. God, he’d been up too long. Either that or this particular day didn’t need superspeed to drag itself out beyond compare. Possibly both.

The book started getting lighter. More watercolours mixed in with the dark gloomy tones he needed oils for. He found a picture he’d made of the campfire’s they’d lit in winter, an oil painting that managed to avoid the trap of using the dark colours the paints could give him to be depressing, and talked about that for a while. About how all the stories of the heroes had been passed down to him over flickering flames, from the old people who had been alive to see the tales happen.

Bart came across one of his favourites.  A happy picture, or at least one that made him remember happier times. Neutron with his hand stretched out, holding a bowl of warm food up to the viewer that made the page look like a window, or a camera. The ratty orange jumpsuit and stained t-shirt didn’t matter, and neither did the collar and neither did the scars on his face. He’d been terrified, Bart explained. He’d been lost and terrified and closer to breaking then he’d ever come before or since, but Nathanial had offered a hand up and food to share, and that was it.

Bart hadn’t left his side after that. The next drawing was the sketch of his learning to run, freed from the collar in secret, and still looking down at the page, he told the story of how he’d done that, how Neutron had been the one to take his collar off him, and then the only one Bart trusted to put it back on without activating it. Neutron, he explained, had refused to ever take his own collar off. His power was exceptionally dangerous and almost uncontrollable. It was his curse, not his gift.

“Nathaniel Tryon.” Static muttered. “I remember him. He was in Star Labs with us when we were locked up. But he wasn’t on the Reach ship.”

“He was one of the first.” Bart stared at a scar that his friend didn’t have in this timeline. Not that Nathaniel was his friend here. He barely even knew the guy. “We picked him up before you. He was put in a containment suit and let loose on Central City.”

There was a pause. And then, “I thought that was on the day you arrived in this time.” Miss Martian’s voice wobbled from where she was sat, arms wrapped tight around Superboy as Beast Boy’s tail anchored itself to her leg.

“The day you report as the Flash’s death.” Batman remarked.

Two and two were put together to make four. “You had to live with the bastard that killed your grandfather?!” Nightwing exclaimed.

Bart wasn’t aware of standing up. Or, for that matter, hitting Nightwing. One moment, he was sitting cross legged over the sketchpad, and between that and the next he was suddenly standing over his Teammate, fist clenched as blood pooled from the acrobat’s lip. “You do _not_ ,” he hissed, teeth bared and nose wrinkled as he snarled, “say that about my _friend_. He fed me and kept me warm atnight and tookmy collar off, and taught me, and he carried more stuff thanhewassupposedto so that I wouldn’t have to lift so much, and if you think for one SECOND that he wasin control of ANYTHING that happened, if you think for ONE SECOND that he wasn’t tryingto makeupfor EVERYTHING  he did on mode THE ENTIRE TIME I KNEW HIM, YOU-“

Something was holding his arm back. He whirled around to glare at it. “Okay,” Wonder Girl murmured, and was she _frightened_ , “okay, so he was a good guy, okay, shh Bart, calm down-“

“Yeah.” Someone else caught hold of his other arm. “Hitting Nightwing’s pretty damn ballsy, minnow, but-“

“Tell us the rest of the story,” Cassie interrupted La’gaan. “Come on, sit back down, next picture, let’s see how much more shit you’ve got in there, huh? I can’t wait.”

Nightwing touched a hand to his lip, looking down at the redness on it incredulously. Bart’s shoulder slumped. “You do realise I can phase through you two, right?” He asked no one in particular.

“Yeah, but why would you want to have to do this all over again?” Lagoon Boy didn’t even manage to fit an ocean-pun into the sentence. “Come on. Book. Pictures.”

He was half herded and half carried back over to his sketchpad, and La’gaan sat down, pulling Bart with him and leaving Cassie tugging the other side of his body up into the air before she got the message and let go. Wonder Girl released him, but neither of them went anywhere, bracketing Bart on both sides with the warm pressure of body heat and contact that should have made him feel claustrophobic, not comforted.

“I’m not going to apologise for hitting Nightwing.” He succeeded in avoiding petulance.

“Everyone wants to hit Nightwing sometimes. It’s like a universal law.” La’gaan suggested.

“’When I heard that Kaldur wasn’t really a traitor,” an unexpected voice spoke up, Artemis injecting levity into her tone, “I kneed him in the balls.”

Cassie tapped the picture on the paper, and Bart resisted the automatic reaction, namely to grab the pad and hug it to his chest, possibly while hissing. “So he was, um, on mode?”

“Like a puppet.” Bart confirmed, trying not to look at Guardian passing Nightwing a scrap of cloth to staunch the bleeding. “Nathaniel couldn’t control what he did any more than Green or Blue Beetles.”

“Right.” A tail curled round his neck. Bart yelped, the feeling too much like a collar. “Sorry, shit, sorry!”

“Just twitchy.” He forced himself back into stillness. “What were you saying?”

Beast Boy insinuated himself in front of La’gaan, keeping his tail carefully away from Bart. “The Beetles… You spent so much time making sure Blue wasn’t zombiefied.”

“On mode.” Static corrected, slumping down somewhere behind him.

“They’re pretty much the same thing.”

“Fetch Blue” Cassie commanded imperiously. They were smiling in the same way Bart was smiling. In short, definitely not sincerely. “He’s going to go nuts over there by himself.”

“I have him.” Red Robin stalked over, clutching one of Blue Beetle’s arms. “You. Sit.” He shoved Jaime down and folded himself to the ground near them.

Beast Boy wouldn’t settle for just near them, pulling Batman’s youngest son closer and ignoring the ramped up intensity of the Bat-glare. “Kay. We’re good.”

“Yes, please do continue telling us about how we all died in horrible and painful ways.” La’gaan muttered. Three different hands hit him simultaneously. “Ow!”

“You people ruin any of my paintings there’ll be hell to pay.” Bart warned, careful hands curled protectively around the book of paper.

Cassie just curled a hand around his waist, snuggling in so that her hair tickled Bart’s neck. He huffed, blowing the strand of blonde hair away before he turned the page and started to talk again. With warmth around him, and strained but sincere attempts at comfort going on, it made him feel more human. Even if La’gaan was a little spikier than was comfortable and Cassie’s hair itched at him and Red Robin was being incredibly stiff in his posture and expression and Jaime was just out of it and Beast Boy was looking over his shoulder as an antelope rather than a person, they were there. Strangely still put together and not sobbing or breaking or anything too, which he could only be grateful for.

He talked about the other Meta-humans. About how he’d discovered his speed. On a drawing that was more whirling lines and spinning viewpoints than anything concrete, how the world had looked when his collar had been taken off for that first too-fast, terrifying run, Bart admitted that he was supposed to be better. Fast than the fastest Flash his world had ever known. He wasn’t sure if anything would come of it. The Reach had intended to find out.

Bart tapped Red Robin’s arm, and still talking, still looking at the pad of paper, gestured to Blue Beetle and turned the page. Up on screen, magnified and enlarged, a landscape swept in watercolour showed three Beetles, Blue, Black and Green, looking out from a hilltop, facing a rising army of tanks and human weaponry. The scene was one that had happened early on in his history, when some countries tried negotiation and others stood up to the aliens threatening them. Bart described it, the merging of the great Chinese and North Korean armies into one massive force, and the three Reach puppets that had been sent against them.

The next page showed the aftermath of battle. The three Beetles were exact copies, not a change in pose or armour or condition, but in front of them the army lay in ruins.

He didn’t talk about those two pictures. Not because there was any lack of stories. The Beetles had been the devil, the bogeyman, the monsters under the bed at night, and there were an almost endless number of stories devoted to them and what they could do, had done, should do, or might have done. But the Blue coloured puppet was his best friend, lurched into chains and on mode and unwilling. Stories about the Green Beetle and the Black Beetle he could do, but Bart wasn’t going to help Jaime put all the blame on himself for the eight billionth time. None of what happened had been Blue’s fault.

Bart moved on. His throat was starting to complain from all the story telling, more talking than he’d ever done in his life, no matter how many people accused him of being a chatter box. Also, he wasn’t sure what time it was. With the Earth running on its axis down below, tracking the sun wouldn’t give anyone a sense of time, not up in the removed orbit of the space station. He was getting hungry again, that he did know, but that could mean anything.

His friends’ sympathetic huddle wasn’t needed. The drawings of heroes’ deaths were almost over, only the odd story that he barely remembered cropping up, the depiction of Doctor Fate’s host body dying, as Klarion grinned gleefully in the background, an uncontrollable force that had done little to help either side in the end, the Lord revelling in his Chaos.

People had died, yes. He explained how starvation had affected the fat obese businessmen who had once strode up and down Wall Street, their chest puffed out and assured that their work was of great importance.  People had died, as the Reach stabilised their control and worked out their food production, however they’d done that little trick. People had died as the cowards and scum of humanity, the bullies and extortionists and tyrants had taken off their masks of civility. People had died by the hands of their fellow men as everyone was pushed beyond desperation or kindness. But that had not lasted. The Reach had experience with other planets, all over the galaxy, and they had used that to become a constant force on the world.

The dying had stopped. Life had not gotten easy or comfortable, but the dying had stopped, and the Reach punished those who killed their meat before they could use it. Food was scarce, but only the very young or the very old had perished for lack of it. That was the world he was born into. Long after all the mighty battles had been fought, decades after the invasion had truly become an occupation.

The last page of the book came, and Bart let his head drop on top of Cassie’s, breathing out in relief. He’d been so careful with this one. If the other pictures had been therapy, this was a final statement. It spoke of defiance and determination and all the trouble he’d gone through just to take another chance, get another try at building a better time. He’d been so damn skinny back then, before he’d hit any of his major growth spurts, all hard eyes and focused goals and such a jaded, practised child.

In all the book, in all the pages, in every sketch and pen drawing, each painting of watercolour or oil, this was the first, singular picture where he’d put himself down on the page. There were views from above and view from below and sights he’d not been alive to see, there was his parents put down on the page and the man who had kept him alive after they were gone, but the final page was the only picture he had painted Bart Allen. A child with his face turned in three quarter profile, green eyes wary, fingers smudged with grime and buried in the panels of a time machine.

“I escaped.” Bart finished, putting the sketchbook down gently on the ground as the camera tracked it, keeping up with the movement. “I came back. The Flash didn’t die. Blue Beetle was taken off mode. Things turned out differently here. This reality is not the same as the one I came from. You aren’t going to die. This isn’t predicting the future. It’s just… where I came from. When I came from. What it was like.”

The room was utterly, blessedly silent for half a minute. Then people started to shift, like they were expecting him to say something else. Kid Flash honestly didn’t think there was anything else to talk about. He felt drained, like talking about his childhood had taken a part of him, or freed him from something. It was hard to decide which. “That’s it. I’m finished. I’m done.”

“You’re using conjunctions again.” Beast Boy poked his leg.

“Contractions.” Miss Martian corrected her little brother automatically, eyes distant.

“I’m pretty sure no one cares.” Iris said, moving into Bart’s line of sight. “This place has to have a bar, right?”

“Um…” Superman adopted the same looking-for-escape expression Kid Flash had. “Are you sure…”

“Bar. One of you,” his grandmother waved a hand at the League members, “is going to take care of my kids, I am going to the Bar, Barry is coming with me, and we have to figure out what the everloving hell we do with the… everything. Joan, Jay, you coming?”

Bart managed to fold into himself with a green cat on his lap. The green cat shifted out of the way, letting him draw his knees up to his chest, and the blond head on his shoulder lifted away as several different sets of arms came up to lie on his back, warm and grounding even with the odd coatings of armour or cloth or fins on them. If either of his guardians answered he didn’t hear it.

He listened to Barry loading up Red Tornado with Don and Dawn, and the twins squealing as they loudly proclaimed the android to be a Flash. Admittedly, Red Tornado did have the bright shade of red coating him, and a yellow crest drawn on his chest, but the refusals and resulting argument between the robot and the two children was almost amusing. Almost.

Iris broke in again. “I’m thrilled that Kid Flash’s got friends and all, but you lot are so tangled together you look more like an orgy. Does this happen a lot?”

“Frequently,” Superboy countered, “and completely platonically. Aren’t moms not supposed to say things like that?”

“Mini- Superman, I have had a very weird, very tiring, exceptionally confusing day. Do not try my patience. You, you and you. Also you. And you.” Checking quietly from under his eyelashes, Bart saw she was pointing to the remaining Justice League members. “I could find an excuse to drag you away. Frankly, I don’t need one. All of you, out. I’m going to get drunk. You do whatever it is you people normally do, and the baby heroes can snuggle and bond. Platonically, apparently.”

Unceremoniously, the mentors and the adults were pushed out. Iris hovered in the doorway, glaring furiously at Captain Mavel and Zatanna before they gave way. Heroes were siphoned out, pushed past doorways and out of the room by either Iris’ logic or her narrowed eyes. Bart relaxed a tiny, incremental amount, enough to lift his head and look her in the eyes. “Thank you.”

She shifted awkwardly, nodded, and left the Team alone.

“If this is the start to another interrogation,” Bart said into his leg, “please don’t. Orstop it. Or, like, I really don’t want to.”

“Well, you’re still saying ‘don’t’ instead of ‘do not’, so I think we’re still in the clear.” Someone said. Kid Flash couldn’t identify who it was without getting up. “I think I get it.”

“Really.” He tried to inject as much sarcasm as he could into that one word, but it came out mangled and blank.

“After the… thing.” The voice said again, the same person talking. New pressure along the tips of his toes. There was a rustle as someone moved something. “Here, Static put this somewhere safe.”

Bart yanked his head up to track his sketchbook, slightly irrational and entirely justified. Virgil held it like it was made of thin sheets of glass as he moved to place it by the wall, and Kid Flash turned back to the person who had spoken. Nightwing met his eyes evenly. “After the thing, before I met Batman,” his eyes hid his eyes, “they asked me questions, and they wouldn’t stop. It isn’t fun.”

“You do realise,” Bart sighed, “that I know your secret identity, not your life’s story.”

“So you have no idea what I’m talking about?” When he shook his head, Dick continued. “I saw my parents die. Then I had to talk about what I saw to the police for hours. I can say, empathically, that it was not enjoyable.”

“Huh.” Bart snorted weakly. “We could start a club.”

“Mmph. It would need a clubhouse big enough for half the League. That was a good punch, by the way. Remind me not to insult your friends.”

“Sorry.”

“Honestly? I don’t mind. I’m going to be bugging you for lessons on inhibitor collars for the foreseeable future though.”

“Why?” Beast Boy twitched up one eye. “You don’t have superpowers.”

“Yet. You never know when you’re going to fall into radioactive sludge.” Nightwing said philosophically. “Or get a Martian blood transfusion. Or come across ancient Greek artefacts.”

“Or get bit by a scarab.” Blue barely said it, and he still sounded wretchedly miserable, but it was probably best not to bring attention to that.

“The second you become a half-kryptonian clone I’ll eat my shirt.” Superboy huffed.

“Get abducted by aliens.” Static suggested. “Worked for me.”

“Happened to me twice.” Bart complained.

“Wait, what?”

“Where’d you think my powers come from, Virgil?”

“So you… the Reach did you too?”

“Yup.”

“Let’s make a pact not to talk about it.”

“Fair enough.” Bart agreed readily. At least people knew not to ask about that, from some sort of unspoken courtesy of the sort he blundered into at any given opportunity. He put his head back onto his knees, cutting off sight as a sense.

“I can kinda see why you guys like this hugging thing so much.” There was a soft sound as someone landed gently in the mess of people behind him.

“I can’t-“ a muffled thump, an oof of a surprised exhale, and a much louder complaint. “M’gann, I’m going to land on someone if you do that again!”

“I’m not going to do that again Conner, you’re already here.” She soothed.

An inarticulate grumble from Superboy.

“Are we really having a group hug thing?” Mel sounded dubious.

Bumblebee did something that made Guardian yelp. “Pretty much.”

“I think it’s sweet.” Batgirl had a smirk somewhere in her voice. Bart tried not to wonder at how she’d gotten so far into the bundle of people without alerting anyone.

“I would question whether it is a productive use of our-“

“Get down, Kaldur.”

Another muffled noise of impact as their glorious leader was forced down. “This does not make sense.” Aqualad said perfectly evenly. “I am not even in contact with Bart.”

“Shut up or I’ll stuff Garfield’s tail in your mouth.”

“ _Thank_ you for that image, Conner.”

“I don’t want my tail in anyone’s mouth, thanks.” Beast Boy replied quickly.

“Then at least get your foot off my lap.” Bumblebee muttered.

“You get your lap off my foot!”

“Grammatically, that sentence does not-“

“Shut up, Kaldur.” A warm pressure on the knees that were keeping his face hidden and a familiar voice.

Bart lifted his head up, blinking groggily. Tigress sat down in front of him, taking off her mask and bumping their legs together with her proximity. Freed from the covering of orange, Artemis’ eyes were sad. Sad with the lost longing that was familiar to him, the light in her eyes that she always wore when she talked about Wally, for good or bad. He made to put his head back down. She stopped him, batting aside his hands and pulling his legs apart so that Bart was crosslegged, not kneeling, and overlapping with her feet on the ground.

“You’re an idiot.” Artemis reached out and thwacked him on the back of the head gently. “Completely incompetent. Utterly stupid. And you should have told us this a long, long time ago.” Bart dropped his eyes. She tapped his chin and brought them back up. “Listening to you talk is like listening to a bad ghost story. Too much death and not enough surprises. It doesn’t seem real,” Artemis tilted her head, gesturing to the general cloak of people Bart had draped around him, “I don’t think any of us can really see it as real, despite the illustrations. But you still should have told us.”

“Well he did have to find a way to say ‘you all died’ tactfully.” Superboy’s rough voice pointed out.

“Yeah, but I thought we got over the whole secret keeping thing when Artemis turned out not-dead and Aqualad turned out not-traitor.” He couldn’t see Bumblebee, but like Superboy her voice was enough to know her by.

Artemis raised an eyebrow. “Getting back to the subject at hand? Actually, wait. Does anyone know what time it is?”

“Ow!”

“Oof!”

“Hey-“

“Sorry, sorry,” Batgirl chanted, pulling out one arm from the pile. “Okay. It’s going six o’clock in Gotham.”

“Bart, you’ve been up since what, five in the morning?” Artemis looked concerned.

“Hm? Oh, no. Before I got to the Watchtower I had to get the inhibitor collar off me. And before that Savage was trying to get me to draw something. And before that I was waiting for the chance to get at the collar. And before that the Brain was-“

“How many hours, Bart.”

He refocused. “At least twenty four.”

“At least meaning you don’t know.” Artemis defined.

Slightly sheepish, Bart nodded his head in confirmation.

“Right. Here’s what we’re going to do. The Team is going to disperse, and we are never going to let Iris live down that orgy comment. Bart is going to sleep. The rest of you can do whatever it is you do. Bart, if there’s anything else you want to mention, do it now.”

More than a tiny bit muddled, he didn’t want to have to go back through everything he’d said. When he shook his head, Artemis grabbed his hand and hauled him up. The pile of people imploded as limbs pushed and shoved, struggling to get free. Oddly enough at the end of it the whole performance resulted in Superboy alone on the floor, on his back and blinking up bemusedly. Blue Beetle could have given Kid Flash serious competition in a race with the speed he moved to get to the Zeta tubes and vanish into the sucking light.

His Team filed away, and the chatter that they dragged with them was immeasurably calming. Not that Bart wasn’t calm. He totally was. Just a little tired. Just the tiniest bit raw. Nothing to worry about. Aqualad and Batgirl pulled away further into the Watchtower, presumably to go to report to someone somewhere, about something. Better them than him. Everyone else started heading into Zeta tubes, programming various destinations in and being spirited away.

Bart rubbed his wrists. Not that they hurt any more than any other part of him by then. Speedy healing didn’t help fantastically with the good old fashioned muscles cramps that came from sitting on a floor too long. Also hunching over his art pad hadn’t helped. “I’ve actually been here all day.” He said somewhat wonderingly.

“Good to be free?”

“Something like that.” He replied to Artemis, picking her mask up off the ground. While he was at it, he got his gloves and goggles and sketchbook too, handling the latter as he moved it further off to the side and further out of harm’s way with a lot more care than either of the former.

“Time to go see how drunk everyone’s gotten.”

“God, that’s so not crash. I’ve got a better plan.”

“Shame.” Artemis clicked her mask back on, tossing hair out of the way. “Getting drunk sounds great.”

“You go then. I’ve got to Zeta down to the surface for something.”

She looked at him sharply. “For what? Both Garricks and Iris and the kids’ll be staying up here. No way we’re letting them go back home while the League of Shadows could be about.”

“Not that. Different. You know how Blue’s a self-sacrificial idiot?”

“Less well than you do, I’d wager, but yeah, I’ve noticed.”

“I had to spend an age and a half convincing him that it wasn’t his fault the last time anything to do with my time was mentioned.” He put his gloves back on, and they were familiar and soft and as uncomfortable as hell. Bart also didn’t want to think about how much sweat and dirt they’d seen since the last time he’d washed them. “He’s going to be freaking out. Gotta stop him before he convinces himself he’s a supervillain.”

Artemis was looking at him oddly. “You really don’t blame him, do you.”

“Nope. Not his fault he got put on mode.”

“It works out well for everybody, really,” she mused, “after all, with the way Blue’s been looking at you, if you hated him it could end up pretty awkward.”

“Blue’s looking, Blue’s looking Blue’slooking, why is everyone so invested in how he looks at me.” Bart made a face. “Honestly, people have been talking to me about that for like a month. What’s up?”

“You don’t- Of course you don’t.” She stretched out to ruffle his hair, and he batted her hand away. Unfortunately, Tigress was a slippery and sly opponent, and had two limbs with which to ruffle.

“Riddles. I hate riddles.”

“Not a riddle. Go on Bart, make sure he’s not tearing himself up. You’re right, you know, he’ll do that. The two of you were always so in sync…”

“Had enough of riddles.” Kid Flash grumbled, but when she smiled at him he pulled her into a hug.

In the records of history, the contact would not go down as a smooth or comfortable one. He hit people’s shoulders and high fived them and crawled into their laps, but he didn’t usually reach out. Neither did Artemis, and her armour dug painfully into the joint between his shoulder pads and the cloth attached to them before she let go of him. “Thanks.”

“You need any help, you just tell me. Of course, if you call me down, I’ll probably be in the middle of getting blackout drunk, but that’s really the only thing I think is going to help here.”

“Real cultured, Artemis.” Bart sped to the stairs, stopping just in front of the Zeta tubes to call up recent destinations.

His sort-of adopted relation (what the hell did he call her? Aunt? Cousin-in-law? Bart had a messed up family tree) left, and Bart found where Jaime must have disappeared off too. El Paso. Ran back home then. The yellow and red suited teenager tapped his suit, thankful that the stealth mode still worked after the general beating most of his equipment had gotten, and stepped into the tube.

When Bart got put back together again, he felt much more like Humpty Dumpty than any sensation Zeta tubes should have normally prompted. After checking himself over and noting that, no, he still wasn’t an egg, and yes, the world was balanced properly once he got over that minuscule bout of dizziness, Kid Flash concluded it was just being overtired. That and it would be a good idea for him to eat something before any bad consequences reared their heads. No breakfast, a small lunch, and so far no dinner would have been annoying on a good day, but he hadn’t exactly been fed much while on Santa Prisca either, and the accumulative effects of that weren’t good. So, shortly after finding Blue, eating was a priority.

The Zeta tube in El Paso had been installed after Blue Beetle joined the Team, and intended mostly for him. That meant it was close to Jaime's house, and Bart took full advantage of that. Well, not Jaime’s house. His parents. Which was odd, because not only was Jaime’s apartment in a different city, but the Zeta tube transportation logs he’d called up back at the Watchtower hadn’t shown anyone using the network to go from El Paso to anywhere. Just the one arrival.

The doorbell still worked fine. Jaime’s mom appeared at the entrance, glancing somewhat suspiciously out before she saw Bart and his uniform and opened the door. “Kid Flash! We haven’t seen you for ages.”

“Hey, Mrs Reyes. Look, um, sorry but I really can’t stay for too long. Is Jaime here?”

“Jaime came and went.” Her brow furrowed. “He was not happy.”

“Yeah, figures.” It couldn’t have been as easy as finding Blue in the first place he looked, couldn’t it. “You know where he went?”

“He said he was flying home. Is this urgent?”

“Superhero stuff.”

“Right, right.” Thankfully, she seemed to pick up on half-fidgety, half run down state. “He went that way, there.” Mrs Reyes traced the path with her finger. “That’s where he’d normally fly off to, if he was flying to his apartment.”

“Crash. Gotta go, sorryfordistrubingyou.” He flipped down his goggles and adjusted their settings, trying to find out whether he’d be able to see some sort of trail or not.

He couldn’t. The goggles couldn’t see the heat signature or light trail, but they did give him directions leading him, showing him where to run to get to Jaime’s apartment. If Jaime’s mom was right, that’d be where Blue was going, and Bart could intercept him. Kid Flash set off, ignoring the twinge as his healing compensated for how long he’d been running already for that day’s various escapades. It wasn’t exactly polite to leave Mrs Reyes like that, without anything resembling answers or an explanation, but frankly he’d gone far beyond his fair share of explanations, and he could do without another one.

The night vision on his goggles kept his sight clear, directions showing up as just an arrow. Of all the modifications he’d ever had done to his uniform that was one that had proved itself to be constantly and consistently useful. The arrow wasn’t enough to distract him, but it was enough to keep him on course. When he remembered to use it. Which was to say, only about half of the times when he _should_ have been using it. Without a communicator Bart was relying on it more than usual, unable to just call up Blue Beetle and ask where he was. Not that Blue would be particularly likely to answer if he was in a mood.

The light trail that flickered after Jaime when he flew using his jetpack became visible over the horizon. Kid Flash caught up quickly, running underneath the armoured hero before he bent down to snatch a handful of small chips of rock from the ground. It was a repeat of what they’d down nearly a month ago, Bart dinging the pebbles off Blue’s armour to get his attention. There was a reason he used that method. The clinking of the rocks was hard to ignore and annoying, and without a direct link to talk to Jaime it was his best bet to grab his attention. His friend jerked in the air, slowing down fast enough that Kid Flash had to swerve and make his way back, but landed, the avoidance tactic Blue had used before luckily not making an appearance.

Bart skidded slightly as he stopped, almost but not quite bumping into the blue armour. “Hey.”

“…Hey.”

Tentatively, he reached out, prodding at the chest plate of Jaime’s armour. “You alright?”

“Are _you_ alright?”

“Okay.” Bart rolled his eyes, uncaring that the goggles probably hid that gesture. “Are you going to say anything that’s not just echoing me?”

Usually, that would have meant snark and banter, his friend pouncing on the opening Bart was leaving for him. Jaime just shifted his weight awkwardly, an inadequate reaction if ever Kid Flash had seen one.

Bart sighed. Standing around in a place that was just to the left of the middle of nowhere wasn’t going to help pry open Jaime’s shell, and it certainly wasn’t comfortable. “Come on. Follow me.”

“…Why?”

“Because there’s a better place to talk then here, idiot.” He couldn’t help it if the last word was sort of affectionate. “You’ve got the bug on your back. Where’s the nearest town?”

Jaime seemed to focus a little, which could only be positive. “That way.”

“Crash, you lead then.”

“But-“

“You lead, and when I want to call you down I’ll throw stuff at you.” Bart gave him a gentle shove, trying to push him up into the air. “Go on.”

Even going at the slow speed Blue’s wings gave him, the town wasn’t far away. Without fiddling around with his goggles and checking the GPS, Bart had no idea where they were beyond the general assumption that it lay on the path between El Paso and Jaime’s apartment, and if he was honest, it didn’t seem worth the bother to find out. Blue landed on the roof of one of the small parade of shops closing down for the night, and Bart went to join him, taking a route up off the top of a car and a high fence to make his way up to roof level.

He could see why Blue had landed on the surface. It was flat, a neat square with raised sides that came off the walls of the building below. Above them, the sky was in the middle of darkening, the sun gone over the horizon but its light not quite left the world. Bart dropped down on the raised edge next to Jaime and took off his goggles, letting them hang around his neck. In response, the armour disappeared, retracting back and exposing Jaime’s face.

When his friend made no attempts to start talking, Bart spoke up. “It’s pretty shitty that we have to have two incredibly awkward conversations within a month.”

Jaime still didn’t say anything.

Bart elbowed him. “Conversation implies two people, her-man-o.”

“You still don’t say that properly.”

“I’m not Spanish!”

“You’ve been saying it for four years.”

“Well, bad habits and all of that.”

“Bart…” the tone of voice made him turn to look at Blue Beetle. “There’s nothing… nothing else, is there? I’m not sure I could take anything else you’re hiding.”

He sobered up, holding out a hand in promise. “Nothing else. I swear, Jaime, you’ve heard it all. Nothing else.”

“It doesn’t… seem real.”

“I’m glad it doesn’t.” He was trying to remember that pact he’d made with himself, to keep his distance, not to bother Jaime, but usually by that point in a conversation that truthfully sucked for both of them he’d have wormed so far into Jaime’s personal bubble by then that at least two limbs would be overlapping. “It isn’t good for you to think about. And I don’t want you to-“ Bart tried to find a way to say ‘stop touching me’ platonically, “-keep avoiding me.”

“Why shouldn’t I think about it?” In a burst of movement, Blue Beetle stood up, armour not quite coming out to encase him. “It’s my _fault_!”

“No.” Bart looked up at him, unafraid and hoping showing that enough to get it through Jaime’s thick skull. “It isn’t. Wasn’t.”

“I probably killed, or helped kill half the people in that book! I-“

Bart stood up to join him, taking full advantage of how equal they were in height now that he’d grown. “No. Jaime,” he darted out a hand to grab his friend’s shoulder, because Jaime looked two seconds away from just taking to the air and fleeing, “that world will never happen. That’s what I fought for.”

“But _in_ your world, it _did_ happen, and it’s my FAULT!”

“No. It. Isn’t.” He stressed. “It isn’t your fault any more than what Neutron did was his fault. You were on _mode_ , Jaime, you and the scarab weren’t in control. You aren’t responsible for what you caused while you were a _puppet_.”

“I am!”

“If you are, than so was Neutron, and you’ve already seen what happens when people suggest that in front of me. Drop it, dude, please, seriously, drop that idea. It isn’t going to give you anything good.”

Jaime’s shoulder gave way under his hand, a release of tension entirely unrelated to the guilt Bart could see eating at him. “I don’t understand how you can even look at me.”

“Dude. Neutron. Lived with him for four years, I think the idea that people on mode can’t control their own actions must have sunk in somewhere during that time. I am not, nor have I ever been angry with you, especially not for something that was so far out of your control. Although if you could stop avoiding me that’d be great.”

He flinched, and that was a complete give away. “I haven’t been avoiding you.”

“You aren’t?” Bart raised his eyebrows and shifted; moving before Jaime could notice or that little voice in the back of his head that told him provoking people wasn’t a good idea could speak up, zipping in so that he was pressed against the de-armoured Blue Beetle from shoulder to hip. Jaime yelped and jerked backwards. “Because you’re doing such a great job proving that.”

“I’m not-“

“I didn’t expect you to be comfortable with me,” something holding him back snapped, cut by exhaustion or defiance or just the rising anger as Jaime continued to sputter something they both knew wasn’t true, “but I thought you’d at least be _honest_ if you couldn’t get over the fact that I kiss guys instead of girls. I thought that you _know_ that I’d NEVER push myself on anyone like that, ESPECIALLY if they’re my FRIEND.”

“Bart, it isn’t-“

“People keep going on about how you look at me!” He threw up his hands. “I guess this is why! I guess you’re worried that I’ll what, molest someone if you take your eyes off me?! THANKS for that, REALLY.”

“Mal idea, mal idea!” Jaime babbled, his armour snapped up and wings lifting him into the air with his head still exposed.

“I have no clue as to what the _fuck_ you’re saying, but at this point I’m finding I reallydon’tcare. Could you please just _tell_ me? Just _say_ that you don’t want me near you anymore? I’m gay, Jaime, not an alien, I’ll get it, I’ll stop touching you, but I think I deserve being _told_ that rather than having to figure it out of myself.”

“No, Bart you have the _wrong idea_!”

“Jaime, it has been a month,” he hissed, “and all you’ve done has been to try to stop getting within half a meter of me. I’m not stupid. I just really wish you’d explained it yourself instead of jumping away from me until I connected the dots.”

“I- no, listen to me, no!” His face was still free of the blue plating, his eyes wide and panicked. “Weren’t we talking about the, the paintings and stuff?! Isn’t that more important!”

“Not to me. Not right this second. I lived through that stuff; I am already perfectly familiar with what happened, _thank you_.” He was losing momentum. Shouting was just shouting, not a magic spell that would change how Jaime was thinking of him. “I should Zeta back.”

“No!” Blue Beetle snatched as his arm. Bart shimmered, phasing out of the hold, but got his other arm stuck in an equally desperate grip. “No, _please_ don’t, you’ve got to believe me Bart, that isn’t what it is, _please_ don’t.”

Bart glared, trying to fit as much disbelief and disappointment and accusation into the brief second of eye contact as he could. “I don’t see another explanation. And I’m tired. Let go of me.”

Of all the many and varied retorts Jaime could have given, the speedster was not expecting the one move he did make. Blue Beetle bent his body as he hovered just off the ground, ducking down not in embarrassment or contrite apology, but to shove up against Bart and press their faces together, touching lips in a chaste, quick movement that was less a touch and more of a clumsy assault. Bart froze, stiffening as his muscles locked up.

Jaime let him drop the tiny distance to the rooftop. “I’m confused.” Bart said very honestly.

“You’re stupid.” He smiled as he landed, a soft expression that suited his face. “I mean, I understand why you’ve been a little caught up in everything else, but-“

“You kissed me.” It was almost a question, something Bart need confirmation of.

“Well… yeah. Sí, I mean, you looked like you could use… Just for comfort, y’know.”

Jaime trailed off, or Bart stop listening to him. He wasn’t sure which. Comfort. _Comfort_. “You did that to _comfort_ me?” He seethed, advancing on Jaime.

His target took a step backwards, closer to the ledge running round the roof but not far enough if Bart had anything to say about it, wearing a stupidly bewildered face. “Yes? Why?”

“You do not KISS people to COMFORT THEM!” Bart exploded, forcing Jaime another step backwards as he pressed forward. “You do not ASSUME that I in ANY WAY would want to shack up with you for relief JUST BECAUSE I’M GAY. You don’t POUNCE on me and you don’t get to decide WHETHER OR NOT I ACTUALLY WANT YOU KISSING ME IN THE FIRST PLACE!”

He pirouetted in a move more like a ballet dancer than a street fighter, building up the sort of momentum only superspeed could give him to twist and kick, hitting Jaime’s chest and sending him toppling backwards off the roof, wings and armour coming out to arrest his fall.

Bart scowled down at him. “I am _sick_ ,” he hissed violently, “of whatever the FUCK is goingon with you. Whatever yourproblem is I fucking don’t have a clue, and I can’t give a fuck. I have my own shit to get through. Someone else can receive your sort of _comfort_. I have to see whether my grandmother has gotten dangerously drunk and ifthe people I live with are going to HATE me because I think I _might_ have blurted out my sexuality somewhere in the whole SHITTY mess of talking. Good _night_.”

He’d thought he was out of energy. Apparently not. He ran blindly down the path set by the arrow on the screen of his goggles until he realized just where that would lead and how much of the good idea that wasn’t. The yellow and red blur jerked north, following a path set only by the star he could see in the sky and the fast darkening landscape, furiously angry.

That was the most ignorant, imbecilic, vexing, horrible way someone had ever attempt to comfort him in his life. And it was worse than that, because if Bart was honest with himself, it hurt. It hurt, because it had gotten under all the metaphorical armour he had around himself and scratched at a very real want. A want that he shouldn’t have and that had never been acted upon, but a want nonetheless that he was left trying to stub out like a match before it could get anywhere near a fuse. To be used and discarded and disregarded like that, to have it assumed that all he needed to feel better was a good fuck, irrespective or who it was or why or if he wanted it or-

It hurt and he ran.


	13. Part 12

Kid Flash opened his eyes to a plain, neutral, unassuming room. The air hissed quietly through the vents. A humming that drifted on the edge of being heard or felt was barely detectable, like a heartbeat, only there when he looked for it. Apart from the bed, the room was only equipped with a time display and a door linking it to a small sterile bathroom.

It was undeniably similar to Santa Prisca. Take away the door and leave the passage to the bathroom an empty archway, replace the bed with a mattress put over a board that was only a few degrees more uncomfortable, and put sticks of iron into a window in the door, it would have been an uncanny replica. Yet when he searched for that almost unnoticeable heartbeat, Bart could sense the engines of the Watchtower.

When he blinked his eyes, the gunk stuck in them scratched at the skin there. However long he’d been sleeping, it had been enough to make his limbs stiff and heavy and his mind fogged. Checking the time display, he blinked again, more in surprise than to try to wake himself up, but perhaps the latter would have been useful. Ten in the morning was almost incomprehensively late to him. The gunk in his eyes made itself known again, and he moved to rub at his eyelids with one gloved hand.

Bart cursed. The dirt encrusted on his glove wasn’t helping. Pulling the covering off irrationally impatiently, he finally got his eyes free of their obstructions. Then his brain caught up with his body and politely informed him that apparently he’d collapsed into bed the previous night without taking off any of his uniform, had fallen asleep with his entire ensemble still on him, boots and gloves and goggles and all. He groaned, looking at the dirt he’d left all over the previously untouched sheets. The rooms set up in the Watchtower were made for emergencies or evacuations or for visitors coming from off-world. Not for Kid Flash to track dirt through, no matter how tired and fuming and over it all he’d been when he’d gotten back from the surface the previous night. He was going to have to clean it up.

Cleaning himself up had to take priority over that. After three days wearing his costume and running in it and sleeping in it and fighting in it, Bart didn’t smell appealing. It wasn’t his fault, and usually he wouldn’t give it much thought unless whatever fight he was in moved to any sewers at any point, but the amount of dirt and sweat on him had passed excessive.

The shower hissed and the water turned too-hot before it adjusted as he got in it, and he went through the motions methodically, soap and shampoo and conditioner before he was clean, got out and had to face the reality of wearing the same dirty clothes. That could be fixed. Carefully, he stepped out of the room. Back in it. Out of it. Breathing a sigh of what wasn’t relief, he moved on.

The main entrance cavern in front of the Zeta tubes was a sight he was sick of seeing, but was ultimately doomed to go through unless there was another way of hopping off the space station. Actually, thinking about it, he was sure that a fatherbox had put in isolated storage somewhere at some point. But at that moment, the room was empty of other people, so his main objection to the place didn’t apply. He programmed the Zeta tube to Central City, and promptly was spirited away back down to the surface.

Kid Flash blurred through the tube and back to familiar, earth-bound ground. Central City was woken up and moving, people pulsing through its walkways and traffic lights as symbols flashed green, and then less so as he ran out of the business district and into suburbia, cars making up the transportation there. The house was deserted when he arrived. He checked, scanning on infrared and night vision before checking all the roofs and driveways and bushes approaching his home, just to be sure.

Inside he got what he needed and then retreated. While he couldn’t see anyone from the League of Shadows, they wouldn’t be wearing bright neon lights or lurid clothing. They’d snuck up and taken him down once before. Kid Flash had to be wary. He took his one of his two spare costumes and raided the master bedroom, taking clothes for Jay and Joan and shoving them all into a spare backpack grabbed from the laundry cupboard.

So equipped, he travelled back to his room in the Watchtower, the Zeta tube offering a strange stepping stone between both places. Kid Flash tore off the stained, possibly ruined clothes he’d had on out of necessity, and put on a cleaner suit, one that’s shoulder pads didn’t dig into the gap between shoulder blade and armpit. He folded the wrinkled heap that was the dirty uniform, moving his sketchbook to lie on top of the pile. Sentimental, sure, to think that putting it on cloth instead of good, perfectly sterile ground would do anything for it, but it was an important book of paper.

Doors, doors, he loved doors. Especially when they opened for him, especially when they lay permanently unlocked. He phased through the last one for no other reason other than to remind himself that he could. Kid Flash stopped at a room mainly full of arrows and pellets of Stuff Not To Touch and bataraangs, a place also home to the collections of communicators the League stocked up for when times got tough and small electronics got broken. The supplies were already depleted, reminding Bart of the effects of his EMP and bringing a smile to his face. If the communicators the adult heroes wore still weren’t functioning, the technology back on Santa Prisca wouldn’t be working either. He clicked open the red casings and put the communicator back where it belonged.

Clean with a new suit on and communicator happily in place, now came a different objective. Breakfast. Which was going to be awkward and stilted and horrible from the social environment side of things, but on the other hand he’d had little but boxed food and dry sandwiches and emergency protein bars for far too long. The upside of good food was better than the downside of having to face whoever was in the kitchen at the time.

Hawkman was in the kitchen, the adult’s fully stocked with food and larger kitchen, hunched over the stove with his wings blocking access to anyone else. His wife was talking with Wonder Woman over in a corner, carrying expressions that suggested they were both arguing and agreeing all at once. It wasn’t busy, but either several League members had forgotten to eat breakfast earlier in the day or the Flash family weren’t the only people who had stayed the night. Tigress had a distinctly hungover look on her face, sitting opposite to Aqualad and the Atlantian King as Aquaman drank down his platter of food. Superman, the Martian Manhunter, Captain Atom and Zatanna were all gathered around a table, Zatanna’s hand paused mid-sip of her coffee.

“I have a feeling that there was talking here before I came in.” Bart announced blithely into the space. “So really, carry on. Don’t stop on my account.”

That was where ‘distasteful’ came into the equation. Specifically the mix of guilt and anger and betrayal and sympathy he received from various points around the room. The silence stayed. Kid Flash shrugged; put on a nonchalant air the covered up the simmering irritation the treatment prompted in him, and walked over to Hawkman. The winged humanoid eyed him up, but shoved aside a portion of the fish he was cooking onto the topmost plate of a nearby stack and handed it over.

Bart nodded his thanks and sat down at the table where Zatanna’s coffee had progressed to being put down as she kept staring at him. He raised an eyebrow. “Good morning to you too.”

She hurriedly looked away. Bart let it go and doubtfully tasted the food. While the cook definitely wasn’t using Earth methods, it tasted delicious, so he dug in, trying to ignore the continuing lack of any background noise until it became too much, and he looked back up at Superman. “I can go if you want.”

“What?” The kryptonian jolted. “No, no don’t. We… sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Going back to normal would take time. He knew that. Didn’t like it, but Bart had to respect that the revelations he’d come up were going to freak people out. “Do you know any place I can get goggle cleaning stuff?”

“What?” Superman repeated.

“Glass cleaning stuff. These things,” Bart held up his goggles with his left hand, still spooning food into his mouth with the right, “got just as dirty as the rest of me, but the stuff I use for mantinence is down in Central City. Does the Watchtower have stuff for that, or do I need to Zeta down to the surface?” He should have brought it up with the new suit and spare clothes. Should have, but hadn’t, just forgotten about it until he needed a topic for conversation.

“No.” The Martian Manhunter pronounced.

“You don’t have any up here? That’s okay, I’ll just-“

“He means you can’t go down to the surface.” Zatanna interjected hurriedly. “It wouldn’t be a good idea right now.”

She looked nervous, more nervous than the magician usually ever looked unless Doctor Fate was risking himself for something. The others, Captain Atom and the Man of Steel and the Martian Manhunter looked similarly solemn. Bart wanted to poke at the question and ask why, because they were talking about him, not them, a distinction that he didn’t understand, but lately he’d done too much poking. Maybe it was best to let that restriction pass without comment.

“Fine,” he decided, switching topics. “Have any of you seen my family?”

That caused even more alarm with glances between each other and little twitches that he annoyingly couldn’t decipher. “You mean… this timeline?” Captain Atom hesitated for no discernible reason, cringing a little.

Replying with a ‘well, duh’ wouldn’t have been anything resembling tactful. Bart settled for nodding.

Zatanna actually sighed in relief as the Martian Manhunter answered him. “I believe the Flash has his family in front of a television in the lounge on this level. Jay and Joan Garrick ate here some time ago and then travelled upwards. I do not know where.”

“Right. I’ll go see them than.” Again, an almost unnoticeable expression of horror before he got up, taking his plate with him. Bart left the four heroes to do whatever it was they’d been doing before he arrived and refilled his plate from the food Hawkman was still making, leaving the still unnaturally silent kitchen behind him.

Outside when the door hissed shut behind him he rubbed at his cheek tiredly, before gathering himself up and moving on. If Jay and Joan were nowhere to be found, that would suggest that they, well, didn’t want to be found. The highest levels of the Watchtower usually lay empty. He wasn’t sure if he could even remember his way around the various hallways and corridors. The sounds of children’s cartoons blaring from a room normally only graced with the most serious of television conferences made up his mind for him.

Dawn and Don were wrapped up in blankets already sticky with little fingerprints, gazing enthralled at the screen as something yellow and cheery-looking danced on it. The little girl squirmed, trying to free one arm to mimic the instructions of what Bart supposed could, if he looked at it in a funhouse mirror, be considered a bear, and Don got rolled over, the cup in his hand tipping toward the clean white fresh carpet the justice League thought was a sensible choice for a room to be decked out in.

Bart watched the cup fall, bending down to put his food on the ground, ready to dart out and catch. But as he bent down to drop his plate, another figure appeared, hand stretched out to clasp the cup. Barry stopped the projectile before it could tip too far, and Kid Flash stood up, watching as the other speedster returned the cup to the child, admonishing his son for being so careless.

For now, they were happy. They were content in front of the insipid singing yellow thing on the screen, the twins were happy; their parents could take the opportunity to relax. He wouldn’t disturb that. Bart left quietly, leaving the family to be a family. Talking to Barry and Iris could wait. It was cowardly, but talking to Jay and Joan could also be avoided, mainly because he didn’t know what room they were in, and he didn’t know how to find out. Not that he couldn’t check every room on the space station if he wanted to.

He picked at his food as he stepped into the elevator, for once indifferent to taking the machine instead of running. Bart had explained everything, had even given up illustrations for his stories, but the aftereffects of his lies and what there’d hidden weren’t going to go away. He’d have to talk to his family soon. Eventually. Maybe. Very, very gently, Bart thunked his head against the elevator doors, before they slid open and admitted him into the warren of rooms which the Team frequented.

A hour later, plate empty and dumped haphazardly in the sink, lying down with his feet draped over the end of a couch and his face turned to eye the time display blinking on an otherwise empty screen on the wall, Bart still wasn’t any closer to doing anything productive.  In fact he was stuck in a haze of non-productiveness, unable to do or think beyond keeping a careful balance between those subjects he wanted to avoid.

Family and friends had never sounded so vaguely threatening. He needed to talk to his grandparents. He needed to talk to his guardians. He needed to talk to his best friend, although the qualifier in that case was a bit fuzzy. Or blurred beyond recognition, but Bart would have liked to think that their friendship wasn’t irreparably damaged. Even it-

He groaned, and covered his eyes as he stopped that train of thought. In the midst of that motion, he ear beeped, and two of his limbs twitched in sudden and embarrassing surprise. His communicator shouldn’t have surprised him that much. He’d only been without out for a matter of days, not weeks. That particular set of high pitched, polite peeps was a call to arms. Not urgent, but a suggestion to all available Team members to tune in and take orders.

He moved one hand from his eye to the lightning bolt happily secured over his link to the other heroes, and switched on the channel, just listening. “-don’t really know if its permanent.” Batgirl finished.

“If it was conventional weaponry, I’d say it couldn’t be lasting.” The Atom spoke into his microphone.

His apprentice spoke up, Bumblebee speaking clearly through the channel. “Yeah, but it ain’t conventional. It’s not even from _earth_.”

“While it is an inconvenience, it is not an insurmountable obstacle.” Aqualad imparted firmly. “That is the reason we need to gather in the Watchtower before we leave. Anyone carrying electronics must be aware of the risks.”

“Wait, what risks?” Artemis snapped. “They’ll all just go kaput. Not risk of explosions or anything.”

“That was what I meant. Some of the equipment some of our numbers carry is very valuable.” Aqualad pointed out the obvious. “We do not know if the device set off will affect them.”

“It won’t.” Bart testified, and kept talking through the perturbed silence he caused. “The things shut down will stay shut down, any if I’m lucky it won’t be possible to get data off them. I do think you guys should be careful about bringing Red Tornado along though.” He looked around, counting up the people in the cavernous room. “I’m kinda sick of seeing this place, to be honest.”

“Bart!” Tigress headed toward him, her face mask already in place. “When did you get here?”

“A second ago? Literally? Before then I was in one of the lounges,” he shrugged. “This sounded more interesting. You guys are going to Santa Prisca?”

Of the adults in the room, the Atom, Plastic Man, Black Lightning and Aquaman looked away awkwardly. Black Canary assessed him, staring at him way more than she needed to, and Superman simply looked deeply distressed. Doctor Fate watched the gathering like an experiment that was of partial interest to him. Aqualad turned away from the screen he had up in front of him to answer Bart. “Yes. Is it safe to take the bio-ship into the device’s area of influence?”

“Should be.” His forehead scrunched up. “You’d have to check with M’gann, does the ship have photonic systems or electrical ones?”

“Wait,” Beast Boy hopped in front of him, more four legged than bipedal, “what?”

“Does the ship have photonic systems or electrical ones?” Bart said again, this time slower. “An electromagnetic pulse deals with _electromagnetism_. Photonic systems would be completely unaffected.”

The collective attention of the room felt lighter when he was showing of, rather than anything more serious. Bart smirked. “He’s right,” the Atom concluded, sounding a little shell shocked. “How do you know that?”

“I have a strange, sporadic and at times frighteningly intense education.” Bart summarized, trying to avoid anything linked back to any uncomfortable topics of conversation. He glanced at the assembled heroes. Apart from the League members, Bumblebee was standing off to the side as her boyfriend zetaed in, Beast Boy was standing near Bart and Tigress, Wonder Girl, Lagoon Boy and Superboy were off in a group together, and Batgirl had to be in the process of coming if he’d heard her on the comms. “You don’t need all that many people to go clean up an island. When are we heading out?”

“ _We_ aren’t.” Batgirl must have arrived when he was talking.

Bart turned to her politely. “What?”

“The Team –plus the League members who have volunteered their time- will head out in a couple of minutes.” She continued. “ _You_ will stay here.”

“Why?” Kid Flash met her eyes. “A speedster’s no use on a space station. And have fun trying to find another expert in both the mechanics of time travel and in the EMP I set off, because Bumblebee is right. It was made from tech I stole from the Batcave, and that tech had been swiped off the Reach.”

“We know you’d be useful.” Black Canary stepped forward, and her tone set Bart’s teeth on edge is was placating, calming, conciliatory and condescending. “But with what you’ve been through… it’s probably best for you to stick to the Watchtower.”

“Again.” There was a sinking feeling as he tried to believe that it was something, anything other than the obvious answer. The way that Zatanna had been so quick to explain to him, he shouldn’t go down to the surface no, should he, the Martian Manhunter though so too, Captain Atom and Superman, they’d all been so keen to correct him. Don’t go down to the surface. Stay on the Watchtower. “Why.”

He had to give her credit, Black Canary didn’t shy away for explaining it to him. She drew herself up and spoke firmly. “With everything you have been through, we’ve made a decision. We- that is, the League and your family, think that it’s best for you to stay on the Watchtower, to facilitate healing and recovery and mental wellbeing. This is non-negotiable. You are not to go on any missions with the Team, and you aren’t allowed to Zeta down for any other reasons either. You must stay here.”

Yup. There was that oh-so-obvious, blaringly ill-advised answer. Bart laughed, low and cold, and took a step backwards, clapping his hands together as the sound echoed around the room oddly. “Congratulations, Black Canary.”

Her face transformed from authoritive to alarmed as she glanced jerkily over to her fellow Leaguers behind her. “Bart? Bart, you need to-“

“In five sentences, just five,” Bart interrupted her, “you have summed up my reasons and validated my choice. You know, the one where I decided not to tell anyone about my childhood for the entirety of the time I have known you all. So congratulations. It is _very_ impressive.”

“Bart will you calm down?! This is what’s best for you!”

He looked at her incredulously. “I’m sorry, _come again_?”

“This is what’s best for you.” Black Canary repeated.

“That wasn’t an invitation to say that again.” Kid Flash shook out his hands, loosened up his limbs as fight-or-flight kicked in and adrenaline made the world sharper. “That, Black Canary, _that_ was an opportunity for you to forget what you just said, let it go, and more importantly let _me_ go do whatever the HELL I like. You don’t have the authority to keep me confined.”

“No.” She lifted her chin. “But this has been cleared with your superiors. You don’t have a choice.”

Bart smiled, trying to keep from showing his teeth, because lately in situations like the one he was wading through that tended to unnerve people. Then on second thought, he lifted his lips and flashed the League member a grin. She wavered, and Kid Flash moved forward. “Just a tip, Black Canary. Just a little cheat code to use when dealing with me. I don’t _respond well_ to being told that I don’t _have a choice._ I do not respond well backed into a corner, because that is when I tend to lash out, and such a things have the potential to cause collateral damage. And most of all, siren, I do quiet firmly believe that _no one_ has the authority to keep me confined. Not you. Not Aqualad. Not my grandparents, if this was their idea. No one.”

“You need a calm environment to heal from-“

“From what? Showing you some pictures and regurgitating my life’s story?” He spread his hands. “That hurt and distressed _you_ much more than it did _me_. I painted those things. I know full well what stories are behind each one of them, because I was there and I lived it and I left it behind.”

“EXACTLY!” She pounced on something like she saw it as an opportunity. “And now you need to come to terms with it and what was done to you! You need peace, you need CLOSURE!”

Bart groaned, and brought a hand over his face, rubbed the skin there with the weird fabric his glove was made out of. “You see? That. So, so much that.”

“You’re… agreeing with her?” Artemis squinted, like he was an image that was out of focus.

“Hm? Oh, no. Shit, no, she’s completely wrong.” Bart summarily turned his back on Black Canary, and she made an offending spitting noise like a cat. “I’m pointing out the whole reason I kept my mouth on mode about my past. Y’know, again.”

Tigress flipped her hair over her shoulder, but that was an action a little more easy, a little more willing to listen to him than Black Canary’s confrontational pose or Batgirl’s high and mighty confidence. “I don’t see it.”

“This. This is why I choose not to tell you. I didn’t…” he searched for the right words, taking the time to find ones that felt right. “I didn’t want it to define me. You’re all paying so much attention to me right now, and the first and only thing you’re seeing when you look at me is a traumatised child, an escaped slave, someone who needs to be locked away and protected.

“What happened is and always will be a part of me. But that is more to me than what happened. People are made when they choose, in the choice, the decisions that they work with. Not in the circumstances into which they were born. I didn’t want the place that I’d come from to be the first thing people thought of whenever they saw me. I wanted to be more than just an escaped slave, or a time traveller, or a boy who had lost his parents. I wanted to be Bart. So I lied. I guess that wasn’t a great long-term plan.” He said, tone self-deprecating. “It sure doesn’t look like it worked.

“But listen, Artemis. I am _proud_ of who I am. Not of what was done to me, true, but I am proud of who it made me, and you will not trivialise that by pitying me for it. None of you will. I grew up a slave. I grew up in dirt and dust and ash with a collar around my neck. That does not make me the broken toy Black Canary thinks it does. Personally, I think that the fact that I can hack inhibitor collar, run at speeds so fast that normal physics don’t apply, and that I invented, finalised, and put into workable application time travel at the age of thirteen makes up more of who I am than the bad stuff.” He straightened up properly, so that he was higher than both Tigress and Canary.

“You have still lied to us.” Aqualad stated softly.

“Since the information I was concealing was neither relevant at the time nor concerning any of you in any meaningful way apart from the vague history I was told of your deaths, I’m not going to apologise for that.” Bart retorted coolly.

His leader was more astute than many people gave him credit for, Aqualad’s eyes filing away new information for later examination. “You would argue that you are fit for duty than?”

Over Black Canary’s protests, Bart spoke. “Yes. You have proof.”

“I do?”

“Yup.” Abruptly, he darted over; slipping beside Kaldur to type in information and call up a search box from the archived missions they had a record for on base. “India. An investigation of a factory run by Lexcorp.”

Kaldur said something in Atlantian, something fast and vicious sounding.

“…I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.” Lagoon Boy choked. “What in the seas...”

“India.” Aqualad closed his eyes, recited as if by rote. “An investigation of a factory run by a shell company of Lexcorp. An investigation that-“

“We found slaves.” Superboy hissed quietly.

“We did.” Bart confirmed, bringing up a photo that, judging from angle and height, had been taken by Blue Beetle. “We were looking for clues round the whole mass criminal warfare idea, which I think has been completely disproved by now. Anyway, the factory didn’t have anything to do with supervillains, the reason it looked dodgy on paper was the illegal labour.”

“We. Found. Slaves.” Superboy hissed again, like saying it for a second time would let it sink in. Hopefully it would work, but given the general level of intelligence currently being displayed by the room Bart had his doubts.

“Yeah, freed them, sent them off to the police to be processed through the systems…” he gestured at the screen. “That sort of stuff.”

“You threw up afterwards.” Wonder Girl’s face was stricken.

“I threw up afterwards.” Bart didn’t try to debate that. “Can you really blame me? It wasn’t fun. But my point is, next day I hopped on over to Nightwing and Aqualad and asked for time off. When they didn’t want to give it to me, which let’s face it, is understandable considering that I didn’t tell them what was wrong and we were in the middle of a far ranging investigation into supervillain activities, I kept on insisting on it. Eventually they stuck me on delivery duty, which wasn’t tremendously interesting, but the time away gave me the space to get my head back together.”

Kaldur at that moment looked less the indomitable certain leader and more the young man holding much too many responsibilities over his shoulders with too little experience to be able to react to all of them. “I-“

“Stop looking guilty.” Bart shrugged in a deliberate relaxed movement. “You’re astute, Kaldur, but you aren’t psychic, and even the psychic people didn’t know anything was wrong apart from the whole ‘kids in chains’ thing. Besides, my point is, I can take care of myself. I know that there are certain things that are going to upset me more than they should, and I’m aware of the need to take time to absorb and deal with them. I am also perfectly capable of operating under stressful situations and leaving the throwing up about it until _after my job is done_.”

The voice that belonged to Black Canary started up behind him. “It isn’t healthy to-“

“Oh, be quiet.” Another person snapped, and Bart turned to face Tigress. She paced up to him, evaluating him with far more shrewd perceptiveness than Bart was used to receiving. “You aren’t an actual doctor, Canary, and if there’s a single person in this room who has a healthy and reasonable way of coping with traumatic events I’d be surprised, because we’re currently all wearing spandex. Rational people don’t become superheroes. The real question is what Bart’s doing right now.”

“Huh?” He said intelligently, wanting to back away from her slightly. Normally Artemis only got that expression of intense concentration when she was shooting at something.

“Is he actually alright?” She elaborated. “Or is he waiting to get to the point where he can throw up?”

“Tigress has a point.” Bumblebee was eyeing him up in the non-comfortable, not-showing-off way. “ _Can_ you be okay after something like... all of it?”

“Oh god, can I just go on the fricking mission?” Kid Flash mumbled.

“No.” Several people said at once.

Bart’s foot twitched, and he started tapping his fingers out on his thigh, beating out the patter of the next number in sequence. Seven-six-five-four-zero-nine-zero-four-six-seven-seven-five-six-nine-three-six-three-seven-eight-four-one-five-eight-eight-four-five-three-eight-three-four-eight-nine-seven-six-four-zero-seven-six-eight-zero-six-four-nine-nine-three-nine-seven-eight-nine-five-four-five-one-two-zero-nine-five-eight-one-three. “I don’t get why you’re making such a big deal out of this! When I wondered how you’d react I didn’t think you’d be concerned with _me_. Why aren’t you all more disturbed?”

“Because it sounds like a story.” Beast Boy answered him. “Not like it’s real. Why aren’t you more disturbed?”

“It essentially is a story.” Bart put in, still tapping out digits on his thigh. “This reality is entirely different from-“

“Why aren’t you more disturbed?” Tigress parroted, overriding what Bart was in the middle of saying.

He looked at her with no small degree of irritation. “Damnit. You made me lose count.”

“Of what?”

“Pattern.” Kid Flash sighed. He’d have to start over again. One, one, two, three, five and all the rest. “I’m not disturbed because, to me, it isn’t disturbing. No psychoanalyzing that, let me talk. In my world, in my time, my childhood was normal. It wasn’t more terrible or harsher than anyone else. I know _you_ all find it disturbing, and I know that to you living like that is traumatising and life-alteringly horrible, but to me? It’s just normal. Like everyone else. The only thing about my life that is different to the people I grew up with is that I _escaped_. Then I came here and it is wonderful, so much better than my world that I think I just wandered about in awe for the first few days, but that doesn’t suddenly make my childhood traumatising. It just makes my life now that much better.”

“But you-“

“No. That is enough.” Aqualad put a hand on Bart’s shoulder, skin barely registering as warm with the cool outer layer that most Atlantians had evolved for their deep sea home.

“Kaldur, what are you doing?” Batgirl shadowed him, also moving closer.

Kaldur took his hand away to type in something into the computer, which peeped merrily in acknowledgement of the command. “I am clearing Kid Flash for any and all missions with the team which he feels are right for him to volunteer for within the boundaries of which every Team member is held to.”

“You can’t do that!” She spun her leader around, pinning him by both shoulders. “He isn’t stable, he needs-“

“Batgirl.” Instead of shaking her hands off him, Aqualad held his own up, covering her gloves with webbed skin. “We fought him. When Kid Flash asked to take a break from working with the Team, Nightwing and I _fought_ him. We were convinced we knew what was best for him then. We were wrong, and had I not tried to urge him back into missions by sticking him on delivery duty, had I forced him to go fight there could have been dire consequences resulting from my ignorance. I do not feel confident that we know what is best for him now either.”

“You’re trusting a seventeen year old CHILD with his own mental health!” Black Canary shouted, her tone tinged with the beginning of her shrieking scream.

“I am trusting my _Teammate_ to ask for help if he needs it.” Kaldur lifted his chin. “I am distinguishing that the truths that we only found out yesterday and the events which many of us, myself included, believed had scarred him, happened over four years ago, in circumstances we do not comprehend. I recognise that he has proved himself time and again before this, and I am also aware that he has already escaped the Watchtower’s custody at least once in the past twelve hours.”

Batgirl jerked away from Kaldur to glare at Bart. “He wh- oh. Right.”

“A new costume,” Guardian remarked from his place a little behind Bumblebee, “red ‘bolts back on him, all clean. I guess that’s how he got a communicator.”

“Well my goggles are stillfilthy and I’ve got some clothes to hand out to my family butreally can we stop talking about me now?” Bart rocked on his heels. “I’m uninteresting. Santa Prisca is less uninteresting. Let’s go?”

Black Canary looked close to committing mutiny, Superboy looked like he was having trouble wrapping his head around an idea, Beast Boy looked a little more at ease and Tigress was giving Bart that same sort of considering look she used on complex moving targets. “Yes.” Aqualad pronounced simply. “Let us go.”

The arrival on Santa Prisca wasn’t smooth. With no guarantee that any aircraft would be safe to land, instead of the normal Zeta tube or aircraft methods of transportation Doctor Fate was conscripted in to help, making a portal that made Bart free like he was travelling upside down when he stepped into it. They were deposited in two groups on the one gently sloping beach on the island, the one beach not more related to a cliff than a landing place. Wreckage strewn around them either indicated what had once been a submarine or what had once been a boat that had been effectively, if violently dismantled by one of the visiting heroes the previous day.

It took everyone a moment to recover from magical displacement, but Aqualad was soon up and running the show. “Aquaman and Lagoon Boy, you take care of the seas,” he started. “They may have been contaminated. Batgirl, Plastic man, and Guardian, you are to search for any humans still on the island and for any weaponry still stored. The rest of us are confiscating all technology to take back to the Watchtower. Bring it to the shoreline for Doctor Fate to transport.”

“The technology should all be dead.” Bart put in. “If it’s not I want to look at it. I think I’ll go do my own thing.”

“Why?” Beast Boy inquired, his tail inching closer to Bart.

“Because I can move a whole lot faster than you people and I’d leave you behind anyway and also because I have an EMP to go fetch and make sure that it really is properly turned off. Any objections? No? Crash.”

“Keep in contact.” Tigress reminded him.

He tapped the side of his head. “I’ve got my communicator. Call if you need me.”

Funnily enough, with all the large scale violence, gunfights, superpowered beings going up against one another, and the short incident where Savage had somehow forgotten Bart ran through walls and therefore hands were not a good containment option, a small backpack sitting underneath a bush had gone completely unnoticed. The League had confiscated the translator Bart had reassigned to detonate the thing, but because the reassignment was just broadcasting a word in the Reach language to turn the thing on, it wasn’t crucial to the construction of the bomb. Although bomb was the wrong word. Nothing alive had been in any way affected at all by the EMP.

He dumped it on the beach, content that most of the complex wiring had fused together and the core from the Reach pod was colder than the surrounding air, suggesting complete depletion of energy from it. Guardian was tearing open an armoured door when Kid Flash got to the entrance to the underground complex, and he paused, before running through the thing to look at the other side.

“Knives and that in there.”

“B- Kid Flash!”

“Yup. Knives and things. You probably want to get rid of them.” He put the recommendation out there before he saw Plastic Man carting out some equipment he’d seen the scientists use. So the deportation of technology was underway. Bart darted inside and downwards, waiting impatiently for the cargo lift he’d found the previous day to take him into the earth.

So far the clean-up effort was going well, in that there was a clean-up effort, which admittedly wasn’t the Justice League’s normal pattern of behaviour. Without a government to hand it all over to and in temporary possession of an island containing stored guns and the unfinished plans for a machine that could change human history, for once, the superheroes were on a tidying offensive, rather than the other sort. More heroes were arriving, most notably a Green Lantern who had done a scan of the island, then cringed away from a backpack that had gone noticed amongst the other stuff piled up on the beach.

Kid Flash had then been called in to explain that yes, that was the bomb. And then laugh at his Teammates when some of them actually ducked for cover. The backpack was now in the hands of the Atom, who had gotten so enthusiastic about the little crude device that he was deemed useless for the purposes of the mission and teleported back to the Watchtower. He’d chimed in over the comms a couple of times, usually to ask Bart what a specific part of the EMP had been intended for before more of the more intricate parts of the structure had melted.

At that moment, the channels open for communication were mostly silent, as his Teammates got stuck into the monotonous work of bringing out all of the equipment that had been brought onto the island. Kid Flash had found an excuse to avoid the heavy lifting. He’s scavenged the Brain’s personal equipment from among the caves system below ground, and was trying to see if he could recover data from the gear hit by his makeshift weapon. Not because he wanted the data recovered, but if he couldn’t do it, and he was the one who theoretically knew best what the device did and therefore how to reverse it, then anyone else trying to get the data back from its early death would similarly have a rather hard, frustrating, and so far completely ineffective time of it.

When someone landed out of his sight somewhat behind him, he didn’t question it. Even though Aqualad had cleared him to work, the Justice League members were a good deal more twitchy about having him out in the field. It might have been out of a misplaced sense of guilt and pity, or it might have been because he’d set off an electromagnetic pulse very close to them the previous day before explaining various stories that were mostly morbid and disturbing, but he’d been visited by Superman, a Green Lantern, Plastic Man and Black Canary in the time he’d been working on the Brain’s computers at the top of the small hill and the mostly clear space it had. Luckily, if Black Canary had opinion she didn’t start talking about it right then, which was good because if Bart had gotten one more implication from her that he should have submitted himself to her untrained counselling skills, he was going to run.

“Screwdriver?” Kid Flash requested politely, extending a hand behind him. The tool was dropped into his grasp and he narrowed in on the circuitry again, trying to decide if a particular fuse was blown or just twisted.

The person visiting him sat down on the grass. That was new. Then came the sounds of retracting armour, at which point Bart’s brain put the familiar sound together with a rather unpleasant recent memory, and he froze.

Freezing was not good. He’d have to deal with some sort of interaction eventually. Maybe. Possibly. He just hadn’t been expecting it to happen so soon. “I’m exceedingly furious with you.” Bart burrowed further into the computer for a second, finding an add-on that definitely did not come with the standard model and making a note to take a closer look at it when he wasn’t so distracted.

Jaime didn’t make any sounds, and Bart wasn’t going to turn to see his face, so he had no idea what reaction that acknowledgement had merited. Kid Flash wasn’t going to ignore how his so called friend had acted, the insults implied in his actions and the mind-blowing stupidity of how and when he’d done it. “I’m exceedingly mad with me too.” The other young hero muttered eventually.

“Let me guess,” the speedster shifted slightly, trying to get a better angle with more light hitting the part he wanted to examine. “I wasn’t supposed to react by kicking you off a roof?”

He took the silence as confirmation, but he couldn’t read anything else from the lack of noise. It could have been an embarrassed silence, or a defiant one, or a hurt one or sad one or any of a thousand other things, and if he wanted to judge what his Teammate had come to say to him correctly, Bart expected he’d need to look at body language as well as the babble coming out of Jaime’s mouth. Their interactions lately weren’t ringing of good clear lines of communication. Jaime had honestly been surprised when Bart had reacted in a way that he’d thought was the simplest and most obvious response in the world.

Wiping his gloves on the grass and resigning himself to a talk that was neither going to be smooth nor pleasant, Bart turned, folding his legs under him mid-motion so that he ended up cross legged, looking at the hero slumping just out of arm’s reach. “Jaime, let me explain you a thing.” When the particular variety of mangled grammar he’d used didn’t get commented on, he let that pause drop and carried on talking. “Yesterday started with me already fairly sleep deprived hacking into an inhibitor collar that reminded me of times best left unmentioned. Then it progressed to evacuating my family to the Watchtower and getting backed into the metaphorical corner before the Justice League would do anything. Then I built something not entirely unlike a bomb, Vandal Savage thought he’d captured me again, and I broke his nose and set off a device scrambling every bit of electronics on the island. That would have not been considered an easy day. But then of course, I was pulled back up to the Watchtower to talk for hours on end about memories that I do not consider happy or easy to look back on, in order to satisfy everyone’s curiosity. By the time that stopped, I think I’d been awake for something like thirty six hours, which I can do, but it isn’t crash. Then the kissing thing happened.”

Jaime was staring at the grass by his side, hunched in on himself like his legs would make better armour than the metal he could call up from his back.

“Are you seeing why that was not a good time? Why I really didn’t need another thing to think about?” Bart kept his voice light and even, face moving into the smile which was his normal default expression.

Jaime glanced up and ducked his head back down again, alarmed, when he made eye contact. But slowly, progress was made as he started staring at a point near Bart’s ear rather than the grass he was sitting on. “You… Um, you’re really mad about that, aren’t you.”

“You have no idea.” Bart murmured cheerfully through his teeth.

“I just… I didn’t want to... I was just trying to make you feel better.” He finished weakly.

“Please make sure not to mention the word ‘comfort’ when you talk, because fair warning I may descend into physical violence again. You don’t make people feel better by kissing them. At best it’s a distraction from the problem, notasolution. At worse it adds anotherthing to the very high list of problematic situations I have to worry about, and also really pisses me off. And implies a whole bunch of uncomplimentary things.”

“I don’t… it’s not uncomplimentary.”

“So we’re focusing on the last one then.” Bart was just waiting for Jaime to eventually make eye contact. “You just pounced on me. Suddenly. Without any warning. Completely putting aside how rude that is, that implies both that you assume I’m going to _want_ to kiss you, and that I’m a slut who just wants sex to make everything better. Neither is a great compliment.”

The progress Jaime had made towards eye contact was reversed, as his gaze wandered away from the side of Bart’s skull and he buried his head on top of his knees where they were clutched up to his chest. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Intentional or not, it did not improve my day.” Bart empathized coldly. “I do not need the mess that you have made my head into on a good day; let alone what I’d classify yesterday as.”

Jaime took a deep breath, an intake of air Bart could see and track as his shoulders heaved. “I, um… Wasn’t avoiding you. You need to know that.”

“Well,” the younger of the two said airily, “I’d love to know the real reasons why. Because all of the evidence would suggest that you didn’t want to be near me because you were uncomfortable that I’m gay, but then there’s the kissing thing, which suddenly creates rather a large hole in that theory.”

“Bart?”

“Yes?’

“Please listen.” It sounded so strangely vulnerable, like Bart was the one at fault here, like somehow the way he’d reacted had hurt _Jaime_ , instead of the other way around.

Try as he might, he couldn’t ignore that plead. As angry as he was, as hard as the bemused and startled hurt itched at places he’d thought himself armoured against, this was the man who had been his friend through thick and thin and four years of life. This was his friend who Bart had admitted keeping vital secrets from, and who had accepted that and not asked him to explain. The one person who hadn’t asked him to explain.

He gave up against the affection that was still there under the enraged and offended surface, affection that was rising up and smothering the more flickering, fleeting emotions. “Fine. I’m listening, Blue, I promise.”

“I haven’t been avoiding you,” Jaime began falteringly, picking up little confidence but a whole lot more coherence as he went. “Or I have, but not for the reasons you think. You, you told me you were gay and that sort of… sparked questions. Not really questions I’d been cómodo investigating before, um, then.”

“Is this… You’re telling me that while I’ve been dealing with supervillains attempting time travel you’ve been, what, trying to decide whether or not you want to make out with people your own gender?” He had to make sure. In all fairness, he’d never make a deal not to interrupt or anything. This counted as listening. Sort of.

“…sí.”

“How is that _hard_?!”

“You promised, Bart.”

Right. “Shutting up now, mouth on mode, I swear.”

“I’m…” A tendril of armour crept round his shoulders before Jaime pushed it back. “Not going to think about where that phrase comes from. Not until later. I think… best I can tell I’m interested in girls, with… a few exceptions.”

“That does raise an obvious question.” Bart wished Jaime would unfold. Looking at him all hunched up was like looking at a flower that had stayed closed long after the sun had come out, unnatural, something he felt prompted to change. “Sexual identity crisis and all of that, if you’ve found your answers, why are you going around kissing me?”

“You would be… one of those exceptions.”

Oh. Oh, that didn’t make sense, but it didn’t stop Bart turning red and berating his own reaction and threatening to go into one of those circles of thoughts which lacked a route out of them. Face burning; he unexpectedly gained clarity into why huddling into a ball looked reasonable and wise. With an effort of will, he kept the pose he had, open and confident and mostly a lie. “This still doesn’t make me any less angry with you.”

“No.” Jaime agreed quietly from his ball. “I just thought it might go a ways into explaining why you climbing into my lap was suddenly not so great.”

Bart coughed. “That does, um… right.” So while he’d been acting normally and practically trying to tangle them together, Jaime had been had been thinking about him like… right. He couldn’t even gain coherency on the subject. “Sorry. I’m still pissed with you, but, y’know, sorry.”

“Yeah, I figured I needed to say it but there wasn’t really…”

“A way to say it non-awkwardly.”

“Right.”

Bart wasn’t going to check what colour Jaime was by then. He didn’t want to check what colour _he_ was by then, because he was pretty sure that until he could start processing the fact that he’d almost been giving his friend unintentional lap dances in the middle of when Blue was trying to get an answer on whether or not he was attracted to other guys, Bart thought he’d be in competition with his gloves in tones of flushed red. “I might have lied. Slightly less pissed off with you now. Slightly. Still a dick move, but at least I know you weren’t trying to be that problematic.”

“In retrospect,” Jaime told his knees, “not my greatest idea, no.”

“I love that even after over thirty hours without sleep and a day spent kicking the Light’s ass in various unsanctioned and unapproved ways, I can still make better decisions than you.”

“Once, ese. _Once_.”

“You have a crush on me and you thought the best way to tell me that would be to ambush me after a bad day and kiss me. That’s a pretty big once.”

“Fine, so somehow I was more messed up about the things you talked about than you were. Fantastic.”

“It’s actually pretty understandable.” Hopefully that awkward was over. “For me, that all ended four years ago. You all just learnt about it yesterday, so it’s probably more shocking for you. Also, slavery’s so uncommon here, but for me…”

“It’s normal. I saw the, um, video. From this morning.”

“Everything in the Watchtower gets recorded, but that’s got to be one of the few times anyone’s been interested in watching it.” Bart conceded ruefully.

“I thought you were right.” Jaime confided hesitantly, his tone blatantly unsure of his welcome. “About the defining thing.”

“Yeah, well, whether I was right to not tell anyone and lie about my life for years or whether I wasn’t, all anyone’s going to see for a while is the slave and the rest of it. Not me.”

“Didn’t say you were right about hiding it,” Jaime mumbled. “Just that I don’t think that should be your main personality trait.”

Bart grumbled half-heartedly.

“Do you ever… miss it?” Bart jerked his head up, blinking in shock and the eyes that had been watching him disappeared back behind knees. “Sorry, sorry!”

“No.” Even to his own ears, Bart sounded distinctly surprised. “I just think you’re the first person who’s asked me that. Or even considered that. Yeah, ‘course I miss it.”

If he squinted, he could almost make out Jaime’s eyes as they uncovered themselves the bare minimum needed to study Kid Flash. “But wasn’t it horrible?”

“Horrible compared to what? I mean, when you look at this time it’s indefinitely better, but before I came back here it was the only time I knew. I couldn’t hate it. I mean, even with all the bad stuff, it’s still my home.”

“It’s gone.”

“I know.” He appreciated the plain statement. No frills or ornaments on the words, just truth, truth said carefully and gently, but truth nonetheless. “I’ve really got to stop calling it the future and start calling it an alternate timeline forty years from the point of divergence that has been overridden by a temporal anomaly. Bit of a mouthful, but at least then people might start getting it into their heads that what happened _there_ won’t happen _here_.”

“It’s been a day.” His friend chided softly. “Not everyone moves as fast as you, Kid Flash.”

“That’s annoying. Get better.”

“I’ll put it on my to-do list.”

“…I’m still mad at you.”

Another sliver more of eye and face came out to peer at him. “You don’t sound it.”

“Yes, well. I am. Really. Very much so.” Bart glared at him, torn between amused exasperation and honest irritation. “You’re exceedingly hard to stay angry at.”

A quick flash of a true smile and Jaime was moving finally, finally making eye contact, lifting his head so that it lay on top of his hands that were in turn balanced on his knees, instead of hiding behind them. “I think you just don’t have the patience.”

“Well that sucks.” Bart shifted and moved to grab a small pronged fork-ish thing that he’d stolen to help with his computer experiment, coincidentally ending up a little closer to Jaime. “I thought the ability to hold on to lifelong grudges about weird stuff was one of the qualifications you needed to put on a brightly coloured costume.”

“Hey, the Bat-people do fine, don’t discriminate.”

“My mistake.” He nodded sagely. “You don’t need a _brightly_ coloured costume.”

“Just one that gives you bat ears.”

“Or beetle wings.”

“Oh shut up.” Jaime threw his weight sideways, clonking into Bart’s shoulder and jostling him.

Bart laughed. “All I’m saying is that your scarab claims not to care, but he takes the design of his uniform waaaay to seriously.”

Jaime paused for a second, cocking his head to the side and getting a far off look in his eyes. “He’s not even insulting you. I think he’s jealous.”

“What, that I used Reach tech to build that EMP?”

“No, more the time travel, although now that you’ve mentioned the EMP…”

“He’s not shutting up about it, is he.”

“Nope. There’s a lot of gloating about how it wouldn’t work on us.”

“Subtle, isn’t he.”

“Incredibly so.” Jaime intoned drily.

“Photonic?”

“…He’s just gone strangely quiet. What’s that?”

“Different to electrical. Electromagnetic pulses only affect, say it with me, electronics. Not photonics.”

“Wow.” Jaime smirked. “I think you actually got him to shut up.”

“Never say I’m just a pretty face.” Bart winked.

The effect was immediate and troublesome, as Jaime blushed and then buried his head back under his hands with a groan. Bart rolled his eyes, a movement rendered inadequate with Jaime buried where he couldn’t see it, and poked at his friend’s shoulder.

“Unfold.” He coaxed. “Come on little flower bud.”

The curled in tangle of limbs coughed, something that turned into a snort hallway through before it went back to a more rasping sound. “I’m not a flower, Bart, I mean really, qué? Also this is horrible.”

“It is somewhat inconvenient having you curl up like a tortoise.”

“Not a tortoise either.”

“Tortoise or flower bud, choose your metaphor.” The tense line of Jaime’s shoulders wasn’t relaxing, and his face was still tucked away. Bart didn’t like that. “Hey. Hey, come on dude, look at me.”

Jaime stayed down. Bart rapped him over the head, making him yelp, and moved to crouched on the balls of his feet in front of him, waiting. “Idiot. I’m patient enough for this.”

The idiot in question seemed content to test that, keeping his face hidden, but Bart could wait. More importantly, he knew that twisting his spine like that wasn’t comfortable, so it wasn’t like Jaime could do it forever. He stayed quiet, resting his hands on the ground and letting the tips of his fingers keep him balanced with how his feet were bent. Either Jaime thought he’d left, or he gave in to the inevitability of it. Bart guessed it was probably the latter as his hands trembled slightly before he lifted his head, eyes shuttered and aiming to be impassive.

When he finally met Bart’s eyes, as eye contact was suddenly this big scary thing, he flinched back. Bart flicked out a hand before his chin could get anywhere near ducked behind those increasingly annoyingly positioned arms. He got a gasp in response. “Oh honestly. It’s not hard to reach out a hand and stop you, your reaction time sucks.”

Jaime mumbled something uncomplimentary and skirted his eyes off to the side.

“It so does. Now I’ve listened to you, so you have to listen to me, and we’ll both end up embarrassed.” That didn’t sound great. “Well hopefully it’ll sort this all out anyway. Deal?”

Jaime nodded, still looking of at the nearest tree.

Bart retracted his hand and sat back, planting his butt on the grass. While the tree still held Jaime’s attention, he didn’t duck behind his arms again, so that was progress on one issue. “You didn’t mean to. If you’d picked a different place, and by place, I mean time, I might not have reacted negatively. Or violently either, I suppose I’m lucky that you can fly.” He reviewed his statement. “Hold up, I’m making no sense.

“So I figured out that I like guys pretty much forever ago, which wasn’t as shocking to me as it apparently is to you. Thing is, I attempt not to crush on my Teammates, on the assumption that most of them are, y’know, not gay. You’re attractive, Jaime. I can recognise that and still keep any feelings I have around you platonic. But then that line gets blurred and then sort of evaporates when you start doing things like kissing me.”

He could see the moment when Jaime darted a glance over to him. “You’ve gone red.”

“Yeah, well, told you we’d both get embarrassed,” Bart huffed.

“I think you said something about there not being a way to make this not awkward.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. I am a genius.”

“At least your ego’s intact. Just checking,” another split second of eye contact, and given that Bart was the speedster and not Jaime, that was impressive, “you, um, like me too?”

“I still maintain that what you did was a dick move.” He asserted, because it really had been. “But you’re my friend, and I’m attracted to you, and I’m not quite sure how you define a crush in this case, but… possibly. Probably.”

“So… what do we do?”

“Like I said, you have crappy timing,” Bart grimaced, “and I really am still annoyed with you. For now, I don’t want to do anything until the dust from this mess settles down or blows over or whatever you want to call it.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I can’t make a decision surrounded by the mess I am surrounded by.” He needed Jaime to get that. If nothing else, to accept that and let Bart relax, let Bart deal with all the other messes he’d made and leave the mess between them to definitely be resolved, but not now, not now.

He waited. Jaime took another deep breath, and he didn’t need it, it was like the way that Bart run fingers through his hair to calm himself down, nervous habit rather than necessity. “I-I can do that. This really hasn’t been fair on you. Like, at all.”

“Life ain’t fair.” Bart acknowledged tiredly. “I’m not looking forward to talking to my family, either. Or going back up to the Watchtower.” He blurred to his feet, kicked out at something that fell over with an easy, dissatisfying clunk. “They tried to lock me up there, didyouknow? They went behind my back and decided to keep me there, likeI’m a fucking _pet_!”

Jaime scrambled to his feet, not backing away but instead coming closer, resting a hand between Bart’s shoulder blades hesitantly and barely touching him, but it was contact the speedster sorely needed.

“I’m not traumatised.” He muttered, barely audible. “I’m not. And locking me up somewhere isn’t a good idea. I _need_ to be able to run, but what if Batman or the Flash is waiting when I have to go back? What if someone who’s got more pull over Aqualad makes him change his mind? I can’t…”

“You need to be free.” Jaime agreed softly from where Bart couldn’t see him. “You’re like a wild animal. Put you in a cage and I think you’d just start biting anyone that comes close enough.”

“That,” Bart paused for a second to smile sardonically, “actually sounds like a really good metaphor for what I’ve being doing lately.”

“I… this is going to come out wrong, I can tell.”

“Hasn’t stopped any of us before. Spill, her-man-o.”

“So this is obviously going to sound bad after what we’ve just been, um, talking about, but you could… stay with me?”

Bart blinked and tried to process that. “Yeah, okay it does sound strange.”

“Told you.” There was that tone that always came with Jaime rolling his eyes, and the hand on his shoulder blades lifted away. It didn’t matter if Bart pouted a little bit where Jaime couldn’t see him. “Look, I’m not, um, suggesting anything. Just, I do have an apartment. If you can’t go back to the Jay’s house and if going back to the Watchtower isn’t a good idea, stay on my couch. You’ve done it before.”

“Usually not immediately after we both sort of admitted we’re interested in each other though.”

“Ay dios mio, you’re being blunt. Yes, not exactly ideal. Maybe Artemis? Or, um, Miguel, he could help?”

Stupid Jaime who had to be all sincere and stuff. Bart considered the idea. While Artemis was like an older snarky sister, she had also been nursing a hangover at breakfast. Just going from that, it didn’t indicate she was doing well with the shit-ton of information he’d overloaded her with, not in the least the idea that Wally would have had another five years of life if Barry had died. Miguel was a friend that Bart knew was drifting away, and he hadn’t done anything to stop that eventual separation. Sure, they’d dated for a while, and slept together, but they weren’t that close now except for the odd emergency.

So the question was, did he want to stay on the Watchtower, where there was a chance he’d be locked in again, or go ask Miguel whether he could crash with him for an indefinite period of time, or trust that Jaime was aware as to the consent thing and how not suitable right then was to figure out whether they wanted to date each other and take him up on his offer. The thing was, Jaime was a good guy. Like in the moral, heroic, truly well-meaning way that few others even among the League were, much more selfless than say, Kid Flash. Had it been almost anyone else, Bart wouldn’t have even considered sleeping on their couch so soon after they’d so completely freaked him out, but this was Jaime. This was the person he’d been best friends with for four years. The person everyone in the League and the Team alike usually counted on to reign Bart in when he was going too far.

“Well, if your couch is free…” he trailed off, leaving the sentence open.

He got batted gently, still far too unsure, but it was a massive improvement on the lack of contact or the curling up into a ball. “If you’re going to eat all my stuff, you’ll be cooking. And I know you’re capable of it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He replied innocently, crouching down to pick his screwdriver back up. “Now can you scan this heap of junk? I need to know if every fuse is blown or not.”

“Why?”

“Trying to see whether it’s possible to recover any data from it, or whether my EMP did it in. You think you could do a better job?”

“Nope, but the scarab sounds worryingly enthusiastic.”

“Crash, let’s do it!”

Jaime sighed, but the sound of his armour folding outwards and starting to hum as it took in input backed Bart up as he started work again. With one worry discarded from his current swarm of them and the others beginning to line themselves up into some semblance of order, he smiled as he extracted the add-on he’d take note of earlier, flinging it backward to hit Blue Beetle and make him squeak.


	14. Part 13

 

Waking up in a place that flashed not-quite-right to his still sleepy mind was becoming a habit. At least his current sleeping spot was a little more familiar than the others, and worlds away from the bland sterility they had exuded. His cells, both of them, realistically they had both been intended to contain him and make him wait to be processed by a higher power, they had been utilitarian and blank, like paper that had yet to be written on or something scrubbed clean to erase any traces of its personality.

This was different. He recognised the misshapen, frankly monstrous doll perched on the table that held the TV as a present from Jaime’s younger sister, a present she’d complain about him keeping every time she walked into the room. The furniture didn’t match. The blanket he’d slept under was frayed at its edges and the couch he’d slept on similarly worn at the corners. It was immensely relieving.

Jaime wasn’t moving about yet. Come to think of it, Bart wasn’t entirely sure if he was even in the building. It was either really late or unduly early, the sky dark outside but for the illumination cities tended to spill over. Even the traffic wasn’t making much noise, just the odd suggestion of engines if he focused on hearing them, nothing more. So his body clock, never a very reliable device in the first place wasn’t keeping up with the turn of the planet as it should’ve.

That happened sometimes. If he’d eaten too much or too little or done too much or run too far, his sleeping patterns went erratic as they tried to compensate. Or he just started behaving like a normal person who needed to close their eyes for more than three hours at a time. Bart was never sure if that swing back was him getting closer to normal or moving further away from it.

The kitchen light wasn’t where he was expecting it to be, and he groped blindly for a moment before he found it, flooding the room with too-bright light and making him sniffle sleepily. A cold metal box had all he needed once he figured out which section was the freezer and which the fridge. There should have been a standardized model for those things. Each one had a different arrangement. As much as you could have a different arrangement when the only two options were fridge bit on top or fridge bit on bottom, with the freezer bit taking up the other place. It was possible he was just sleepy.

Luckily sandwiches didn’t require much brainpower. Bread and butter and the rest was optional, although he cracked open a can of tuna for the food. The speedster was just putting the ingredients back in the fridge, methodically making sure the butter was in with the fruit and the tuna was nestled safely in the butter compartment, when another set of shuffling steps snapped him back to a better level of awareness.

“…Bart?” Jaime’s voice was scratchy and deep. “Why’re you up?”

“Because it’s time to get up. Why’re you in the house?”

“I was asleep.”

“…Oh. Somehow it made more sense if you were already out. Well, I say made sense.” He leaned back on the counter, the small of his back pressed against its edge. “Made sense at the time, anyway.”

“Bart, it’s like, two in the- no, I don’t need to know the exact second!”

“You talking to me, or…”

“Him. But it’s two in the morning. Why are you _up_?”

“Because… it’s the right time to be…” Even as fuzzy as his head still was, Bart could see the obvious flaw in that line of reasoning. “Right. Okay, so my body clock might not be functioning at maximum capacity.”

“Don’t sound so defensive.” Jaime chided, and Bart moved aside to let him fill up a glass of water from the tap. “It’s fine, Bart. Understandable, even.”

“I’m not _broken_.”

“Stop hissing.” Any filters either of them had were apparently offline as Bart was pulled by conflicting desires for rest and action, and Jaime was pulled along by sleepiness. “I didn’t mean it like that. Just, bueno, right, fine… I just think that you’d be well within your rights to be way worse off. I’m not saying that you’re weak for waking up at an odd time, I’m saying you’re coping better than I thought you would and then anyone should expect you to.”

“Talking ‘bout my past doesn’t automatically screw me up.” He mumbled tiredly, scrubbing hands over his face.

“I don’t mean that. The whole getting kidnapped thing couldn’t have been fun, and you had to shut the Light down too and you’ve just got a lot to worry about, yeah? I’d have collapsed by now.”

“There were a few close calls.”

“Still.” Jaime clapped him on his shoulder, jostling him slightly with the clumsy movement of someone drifting back into unconsciousness. “You’ve done un buen trabajo, ese.”

“Dude, you’re slipping back into Spanish. Bed.”

“Hmph.” Blue Beetle replied vaguely, heading off in what seemed like the right direction.

Bart left the scarab to guide Jaime back to his bed and grabbed his food, moving back to the living room and the makeshift bed on the couch he currently held there. Putting the sandwich down on the side table for just a second, he snuggled back into the blanket. Maybe being horizontal would be better. Putting his head back down on the pillow, Bart realised in a loose, evasive sort of a way that he was falling asleep but by that point his limbs were to heavy and his eyes too determined to stay shut.

His sleep didn’t get any more restful. Bart woke up several more times, more quietly; more aware of where he was and whose house he was invading. Never quite managing to regain total consciousness, he picked up ornaments, the television remote, a blanket that was too thin to sleep under but had patterns on it that his hands could trace and pick out the gaps between colours like a strange game of hopscotch before his mind settled and let him rest once again.

The turning point came at what the clock called six am in the morning, and what Kid Flash’s head thought was the middle of the afternoon. His body suddenly and abruptly told him in very certain terms that he’d had enough sleep, and Bart woke up, blinking back to full awareness and the still dark room. He groaned, trying to keep the noise down in case Jaime woke up or the scarab decided he was worth investigation, got up, and switched on the light before looking himself over. While he wasn’t actually stuck together with mud or dried salt, his uniform was the only bit of clothing he had with him, and that was probably something he should change at some point or another.

Actually, tidying up the room would be a better idea. Bart didn’t know why he’d collected every fiddly thing in the place –surely one should have been enough, but they were all lined up on the side table near the couch, along with the sandwich he’d apparently abandoned in favour of more sleep. He ate the sandwich, but with no idea where most of the ornaments were supposed to go, just arranged them carefully and wrote a note for Jaime.

 _‘Going out.’_ It said in his usual scrawl. _‘Don’t worry nowhere important. Will clean up everything if you show me where they go._ _My cell phone was taken and the EMP should have hit it on Santa Prisca so thats busted. I’ll call y You can call me on the communicator if you need me.’_

He put the note with the ornaments, confident that his friend would notice the redecorating. Bart wasn’t sure what the polite thing to do was in a situation like the one he was in. He’d be surprised if someone had made rules for what to do when he’d just figured out that he might like his best friend but needed to hide out at said best friend’s house because his family might hate him and the Justice League might want to lock him up. So he put the note where he thought Jaime would see it and left.

Central City wasn’t any lighter than Jaime’s area, with dawn decidedly not there yet. The sky was lighter than it should have been if it was truly night, but the sky still hung itself with more black than blue in the gaps between clouds, lacking the colour that came just before sunrise. Kid Flash found his home easily enough. Less because of a stellar sense of direction, it could perhaps be attributed more to the GPS on his goggles, but it didn’t matter to the teenager. He breezed through the front door; realised said entrance had been left unlocked, and started a quick survey of the surrounding area. Still no goons or assassins, and with more time on his hands, Bart finally had a good look instead of just a glance.

No tracks or trails or hints that someone had been watching the place. Nothing on his night vision or infrared when he fiddled with his goggles, although the dirt that he gotten rubbed into the casing of them could have given him inaccurate readings. Uneasy but not expert in the art of detection, Bart went back inside the house.

He found his second spare costume easy enough and silently muttered praise to the person who’d made him get three. Less easy to find was the cleaning stuff set aside for his goggles. Normally they’d only get cleaned once a month, and before the whole mess with the Light there hadn’t been any slime related missions for ages, so the supplies had migrated to the very back of the cupboard under the kitchen sink, caught on some of the pipes there. He still didn’t know why they had ended up in the kitchen, but he took his goggles off and began the methodical, somewhat numbing routine of taking them apart and removing dirt from all the many and varied places it had managed to get to.

As he cleaned he focused on the work, on making his hands move precisely and slotting components back in place, on electronics and lenses and the wiring set into the rim. Not on the familiar environment, and whether its owners would welcome him if they knew he was there. He didn’t use his speed. It wasn’t an emergency where he needed to keep track of three different lines of thought at once; it wasn’t something that could only be done between the blinks of an opponent. At that moment, he was falling on the opposite side of that balance between waiting and action, too much time and too little an idea of what to do with it.

When his goggles were clean Bart packed away the supplies, putting them right at the top of a cupboard in the laundry, high up where they’d stay unobtrusive and forgotten in a corner. Then he noticed the basket hanging in its place, and washing outside that had been left to dry and soaked with dew and then beaten back into waterless cloth flapping limply in the wind. He brought the clothes inside and folded them, setting them on the shelves like Joan had told him to do, time and time again, don’t leave piles of them on the floor, Bart, that just makes more mess.

He straightened up the bedcovers in the master bedroom from where they had fallen when he’d dragged his guardians out, twitchy and flying from the danger he saw, heedless and immune to any other concerns. Bart leaned against the door to the wardrobe in his room, laying his hands with their palms flat to the fake wood of the door, looking at how clean and neat and barren it seemed. Jaime’s apartment with filled with things, things that were worse than useless, just needless clutter, but things that meant something to him. Bart’s room wasn’t like that. He had pale blue walls that had been that way before he’d ever claimed the space, when it was a guest room. A bed that also came from that time, with covers that were striped with a simple, inconspicuous pattern. A dresser filled with his clothes and a desk, a chair and a computer, all surfaces empty. The only things giving the room personality were his paints and pens and pencils, stacked together with the three art books he’d filled up with drawings and the fourth, lying haphazardly on top and out of alignment, not finished, incomplete.

It was like the room he’d slept in for four years wasn’t even _his_. Added colours aside, it was more like the room he’d been given at the Watchtower or the disheartening but sterile cell he’d been locked in at Santa Prisca. It looked like he still was camping there, rather than settling in. Like staying with Jay and Joan was temporary, not permanent.

Bart scowled at the walls, and moved. Down, down the stairs into the living room and the drawer of jumbled, messed up pens and pencils that had their leads broken and felt tips pens whose tips were smushed into fluffy stubs. Rummaging around past completely empty glue sticks and a pile of knotted string, he found the tape and took it back with him. On his way past the kitchen Kid Flash skidded to a halt. The note he’d left for Jaime. It was an idea that could work again. He snatched the pad of post-it notes and the pen lying next to them from the windowsill before blurring back into speed and motion.

He shoved his painting materials aside to get at the books. The oldest one was first and he flipped it open, past watercolour tests and two paintings of the same vase of flowers, one sloppily done as the first completed piece in the book, one done weeks later as he gained in skill and the plants shrivelled up and withered as Joan found another project to work on.  Then there were others, others that he found uninteresting until he flipped past a page, paused, and came back to it.

Watercolours weren’t great at showing contrast, light and dark and bright and dim close together, but the landscape of a night’s sky was only shades of blue and black, dotted with white spots that weren’t coloured but were simply bits of paper shining through without a coat of paint. He stuck it above the mirror hanging on the wall and attached a note, made of bright yellow paper and with stickiness that would come off if he wanted it to, that wouldn’t damage the painting.

_‘The sky is free of ash here.’_

He turned to the next page in the book, but the next drawing wasn’t good enough. Moving on, Bart found another watercolour, because of course back then he’d only known how to do watercolours and sketches, no pens or oils. The old uniform lain down on the ground wasn’t Kid Flash’s. They’d gone paintballing, on that day, and everyone had worn old clothes, clothes they didn’t need anymore. Bart had worn the Impulse costume, and even with his speed he’d gotten covered in paint, blue from where Batgirl had rigged up a trap for him, green from Wonder Girl’s attack from the sky, purple from Red Robin and his annoying habit of predicting where Bart would run, yellow and red and orange and every other colour from the effects of war raging across a playground reserved just for them. Team bonding, Aqualad had called it, before he and La’gaan launched a surprise attack from a pond. Round the border of the page there were sketches of what they’d done; the victories and defeats of the day done in pencil and decorated with the old spots of colour displaying the paintball massacres.

 _‘I’m sorry you had you get the stains out of the uniform’_ he wrote on the sticky he put just to the side to the picture, placing it below the window. _‘I didn’t understand why you thought I should keep the costume. Not that sentimental, I guess. Not then anyway.’_

He paired the two sketches of fight training with Black Canary together just to the side of the dresser. One showed him defeating her in a mess of lines implying speed, the other, Black Canary sweeping his feet out under from him as he landed on his back. She’d been so adamant he learn to fight without his powers, and in the end she’d been right about its value hadn’t she.

_‘Her stubbornness isn’t always bad.’_

Bart found a portrait of Joan and Jay, her face split in a laugh and he spun her around. They’d been trying to explain dancing to Bart, and why anyone would want to do it. While they’d gotten caught up with the songs that had been sung when they were young, he’d gotten his book down from its place and painted them at they swayed across the living room.

_‘I understand why people dance now.’_

The next he put up was a mess, all line that didn’t meet each other or even have a suggestion as to what they were meant to be.

_‘A reminder that you can’t draw on water, and that paying attention to your feet and where they’re going has to take priority.’_

Picture after picture went up, some with huge comments on them that filled two or three post-it notes, others just with a short sentence saying how fun that day had been, how much of a difference they’d made there. Halfway through the second book he pulled out twin pictures of Don and Dawn, in the first half a year old and in the middle of hitting each other, in the second that same age and about an hour after the first, curled around each other as they slept.

_‘Must give to Barry and Iris. Is it weird that they’re like cousins? They aren’t the people I knew. I don’t think I want them to be.’_

On a big, empty expanse of wall, he put up portraits of everyone he knew. Bart didn’t have a good, three quarter profile and well coloured portrait for them all, but he did have action shots, Cassie mid-flight, Beast Boy crouched half-way off a roof with his tail wrapped around a thin metal pipe, Superboy in the middle of play fighting with Wolf. It didn’t need a note attached.

The pages looked ruined for a time, abandoned with half-done studies of what oil paintings could do and what happened when you blended them together. Then one of his first oil paintings, one that still wasn’t quite done, the sketchy line of what he was supposed to have filled in extending beyond the complete patches of colours. It was a birthday cake, and his family had waited when he’d told them to, with the light off and confused if obliging faces as he’d sketched out the scene to colour in later. He put that one up and attached its note.

_‘Not every scene I wanted oil paints for was sad. I don’t know what day I was born on, but celebrating with you all made and continues to make me feel loved.’_

A scrap of paper was stuck between two pages, a receipt with two tiny cartoons drawn on the back and Bart smiled, taping it up above the head of his bed.

That was when he’d gotten distracted from learning about oil painting and veered off into drawing with a pen. The pages became mussed up with self-taught lessons in cross hatching, in how hard to press, in what tones were better to work from. He added a portrait he’d done of Blue Beetle, drawn in appropriate blue pen with the armour up and covering Jaime’s face, putting it next to the other portraits on the wall. Pen also gave up a strange, monochrome landscape, a black and white bear lumbering through forest that surprisingly hadn’t had much bamboo.

 _‘Theres more to see than can ever be seen. More to do then can ever be done.’_ He wrote on the post-it note beside the landscape, and drew a cartoonish lion underneath for good measure.

The next one he picked out was pen too but in the next book, a picture of snow in the sky and on the ground. He’d seen snow before, of course he had, but it was only once he’d learnt that each snowflake was unlike any other that Bart had started to paint that particular sort of weather.

_‘Ash is always the same. Each snowflake is different.’_

There was a watercolour of Atlantis, one of the few pages that depicted something he hadn’t seen and would never see. The crushing pressure and lack of anything to run on didn’t make Kid Flash suited for aquatic life, but Lagoon Boy had brought him a picture, when he’d asked him a couple months ago, had pointed out the landmarks and told Bart stories about each one of them, red eyes intent on the photograph. Bart had taken the photo and later painted it, for the challenge of new architecture and different colours. Looking at the painting, though, he hadn’t gotten every detail exactly right. The places La’gaan had talked about, the ones that had more meaning behind them, those showed up brighter and bigger in the painting. Bart put it to the side of the door, and stuck a note onto the bottom of it.

_‘Because I may be different, but they are too.’_

Bart flipped over to the next page and stopped. A sketch of trees, endless trees with few small clearing, a view from on top of a massive rock, looking down on a village that didn’t know of his existence. He’d drawn the outline nearly a month ago, but hadn’t had the time to fill it in with any colour or detail. It was unfinished, the last piece he’d started before his painting became such a big deal. He left it where it was, but took one more sticky post-it to put on the wall.

_‘We probably need to talk. Before we do I thought you might like to see that I’ve got one book filled with bad mostly bad stuff and three books overflowing with good stuff. Take the pictures down if you don’t like them, but please be careful with them. They’re time consuming to make.’_

He took his spare costume and picked up a backpack, stuffing the suit and two or three days’ worth of civilian clothing into the pack, along with other essentials he didn’t carry around as Kid Flash. Then he finally left the house.

Back at Jaime’s apartment, he paused in front of the front door and rolled his eyes. Of course Jaime wouldn’t lock it. Of course. Either he was forgetting that Bart ran through walls on a pretty regular basis, or he trusted his neighbours too much. Probably the last one, Bart reflected. Little old ladies invariably fell in love with the twenty year old Hispanic accidental-charmer.

Going inside, he dumped the backpack of clothing in the corner where it hopefully would go unnoticed. The side table was freed from its blanketing of ornaments, and they were all back in their proper positions, which made Bart roll his eyes _again_. He’d told Jaime the he could clean those up. Then again, it didn’t have the same feel to it as how the rest of the world was looking at him. They were wanting to smother him because they thought he was two bad falls away from murdering small puppies. Jaime just sort of went through life snatching things out of Bart’s hand split seconds before Bart forgot their existence and dropped them. In return, Bart stopped him from going overboard with that instinct and generally steered Blue Beetle away from blaming himself for every natural disaster the planet encountered by methods of banter and irritation both. It worked for them.

Bart drifted aimlessly, or as aimlessly as he could. While many good things came of his powers and the core of himself, the core that always watched and planned and gleefully quipped, he wasn’t really ever able to stop. He’d never been able to shut down the way other people did, to swim into a half unaware state and talk in grunts and nods and hums. Either he was up and active and doing, or he was asleep, and the in-between stages separating the two were never permanent or long. Usually that was good. With the mess his life was at that moment, however, he could have used some quiet in his head.

He also didn’t know why, but he was getting an increasing feeling that he was forgetting something. Not something world endingly important, or something that would hurt anyone, just a feeling like he’d left a tap on and now water was being wasted, or he’d forgotten something that he was supposed to have picked up.

Jaime turned up some time in the afternoon, not that Bart knew what the clocks were reporting. His goggles were off to the side, dangling lopsidedly out of one of the pockets of the backpack, and his costume was in the wash as he used the opportunity to get into some normal civilian clothes for the first time in what felt like forever. He wasn’t going to put in the effort to look up at the clock on the wall, and while the device he had in his hands could normally happily provide the time to him, it was dismantled and in a hundred tiny parts spread over the kitchen table. He’d found his distraction.

“…Bart, what are you building?” Jaime spoke cautiously, slightly wary with a touch of suspicion. Which was fair enough, the last thing the speedster had built had delivered a not insignificant dose of radiation. Whether he took into account that the radiation didn’t affect organics or no, it was understandable that the Blue Beetle was a little worried.

“Not building.” He remembered to reply after a couple of seconds. “Dismantling. ‘S different.”

“Fine.’ The casing he was examining was taken for him. Bart mewled in protest. “What’re you _dismantling_ then.”

“Mobile phone. Give it baaaaaack,” he whined.

Jaime gave up the casing and Bart resumed checking it over, mentally adding up the spare space and what could be moved or minimised to make room for certain enhancements he was thinking about. “Aclarar, ese.”

“Don’t speak Spanish.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do. My old cell was confiscated when Deathstroke took me down. I was drugged at the time, but I think they did my communicator at the same time.  If it wasn’t crushed along with the communicator, it would’ve been taken out by the EMP when I set it off.”

“So this is your new cell phone?” He slid into the seat opposite the intent experimenter.

Bart made a noise of concurrence and stuck a circuit board in his mouth at he held up a tiny transistor to try and see if it was opaque.

A new light source helped him, clearer and brighter than the light hanging over their heads as armour crept down Jaime’s arm, making the tip of one finger iridescently white. “The scarab wants to know why you’ve taken everything apart. Although he said it in a way that insults humans as a species and organics as a whole.”

Bart took the circuit board out of his mouth to talk, putting it near the casing of the phone. “He needs new rhetoric. I’m just checking everything out. Planning modifications, that sort of thing, these things are really inadequate by themselves.”

“Modifications?”

“Stop fussing. I did it to my old phone too. The casing has more room for adjustment in this one though; I’ll be able to do more.”

“More of what?” Jaime said.

“Everything. Maximising the camera’s pretty useful; I got the old one up to like half a gigapixel.”

“Half a what now?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s perfectly legal. Mostly because no one knows how to do it, but it still counts, right?”

“No breaking any laws.” Jaime got up, saying the warning in a voice that didn’t expect to be listened to as he wandered over to the fridge and ruffled inside. “What do you want for dinner?”

“I’ll eat anything.” Bart mumbled distractedly. “And there aren’t any laws to break. Yet. I think Batman must have access to tech that’s at least capable of taking a full gigapixel image, this isn’t that bad.”

“Your old phone could do this?”

“Yup, couple of other things too.”

“It’s funny.” Jaime shut the fridge door to look at him in a way that made Bart want to sit up straight and start making excuses. “All of a sudden you’re a tech genius, huh?”

“Huh?” He echoed. “No, not really.”

“Bart. You told us you _made the time machine_.”

“That isn’t new.”

“But we didn’t know that.”

“You didn’t know it, but really, how hard would it have been to guess?” He looked up, attention finally shifting to focus on the conversation. “If I’d arrived in this time and been focused, been deadly intent on the goal, not made friends with you and just tried to stop you from going on mode for my own benefit, if after that I gave you a cell phone number with twelve digits instead of ten, if my goggles never needed fixing and my computer stayed fast and reliable even though I haven’t had a new laptop in four years, this wouldn’t surprise anyone.”

“You aren’t like that, though.” Jaime said.

“I’m never deadly serious and I tripped into valuing you as more than a goal within a day. The rest’s all true.” Bart got up and darted in toward Jaime, grabbing the phone out of his jacket pocket and stepping backwards hopefully before it could sway into awkwardness. “See?”

Bart held up the phone, contacts list on screen as Jaime looked at the number stored for the speedster’s name. “Twelve.” Jaime held out a hand for the phone back, and Bart gave it up. “But, that’s for your old phone…”

“You asked me what my number was, I put it in, and it stayed that way for four years.” Bart shrugged jerkily and moved back to his table covered in phone parts. “I haven’t suddenly become anything. If you’d seen me pulling apart a phone two months ago you wouldn’t’ve been surprised, but now you know I’ve made other stuff too. Like a time machine. Or an electromagnetic pulse emitter.”

“…Or flower chains for the bio-ship.”

“Y- What?”

“Or flower chains.” Jaime repeated. “Or paintings. You make things, when you’re bored. If you need something to do. This… does fit in, yeah. I’m just slightly twitchy; you could be making a freeze ray or something for all I know.”

“Nah. Just seeing what’s in the phone I brought. I’ll clean it up?” He offered.

“I’ll make dinner.”

Sometimes Bart felt uncomfortable not talking. Like if he stopped the near-endless babble, someone would look closer; take a metaphorical crowbar to pry up things that didn’t want to be pried up. After days upon days of prying and a chest that  was now consistently telling his brain it was both empty and numbed in a tired, raw way, he was out of dodges to use when someone asked him a question, and too beaten down to conjure up any from empty space.

Still, being quiet in Jaime’s presence didn’t feel so bad. There was still half of him intent on looking out for early warning, but most of the other half was simply weary in a drained, emotionless sort of a way that only came after too much emotion had been spent on something else. The parts left over from the not-quite halves of headspace welcomed his friend and the support that was there if he wanted it, and was content to sit at the table, putting the phone back together in motions that could have been done in a number of seconds, but that drew out and wasted away valuable, worthless time when Bart didn’t use his speed.

“Jaime?” He said with no warning to either his friend or himself.

“Qué?” Steamed vegetables smelt nice, in an earthy, watery combination. Bart blinked slowly, and cursed his internal clock.

“Do you ever feel like… um, that expression? ‘Waiting for the other shoe to drop?’”

“Sometimes, ese. That happening to you right now?”

“Yeah. Although I think there’s been a bunch of shoes. And the first dropped and the second dropped and then there was another one up in the air and that dropped too and the fourth one sort of landed on its side but made a really loud noise anyway and…” he shook his head. “There’s a fifth shoe. Somewhere. I think I’m forgetting something, but I can’t remember what.”

“If you could remember, you wouldn’t be forgetting it.” Jaime rummaged through the cupboards for something.

“I don’t like this.” Went he spoke again, it might have been later, or just a couple of seconds after what Jaime said, or maybe some in between place on that spectrum. “I’m not good at it.”

“Not good at what? I know I couldn’t put a phone back together so it works. You seem pretty crash at that.”

“Not this.” Another piece slid into place, connected up with the tiniest click as it took its right place in the bigger mechanism. “The talking. Stopping the Light and wiping the data off Santa Prisca was easy. Answering questions was horrible.” He sighed morosely. “I’ve still got to talk to my family. I told them my dad died. And then I actually yelled that I was gay. It’s going to be moding.”

“Yes, you were the epitome of subtlety.” Jaime agreed as two plates hit each other and clattered in a place beyond Bart’s line of sight. “Although… moding?”

“I don’t use the lingo just to joke around. I know it doesn’t make sense,” there was a lock of hair in his eyes. Bart twisted it backwards. “But they mean the same as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to me.”

“Not talking about your word choice, mi rayo.” Jaime stopped talking for a second, and Bart wondered why the silence sounded bashful before his friend started up again. “I don’t think that the, um, gay thing matters so much to you.”

“You can’t even say ‘gay’ without umming before it.” He pointed out, focusing in on a tiny clear plate.

“That’s because I’m trying to get used to the idea I might be it, not because-“

“We’ve established you still like girls. You’re bisexual, if anything. Or Pansexual, or maybe demisexual-“

“Let me rephrase that then, I’m trying to get used to the idea I might like other guys at all. That wasn’t my point.”

“Get to it then.”

“Well you stop encouraging me to go off on tangents.” There was a hiss from a pot somewhere. “I don’t think your family will care much.”

“On a scale of one to ‘I come from a post-apocalyptic future’,” Bart snarked half-heartedly, “how much does ‘I am gay’ effect you?”

“I doubt the news prompted any sexuality crises in them, so the apocalyptic future thing is probably more important to them, yeah.”

“Wait,” he processed that, “it isn’t to you?”

“You’re still you, Bart, and I’ve always been aware that if I was important enough to travel back in time to stop me from getting on mode, the whole future wasn’t as good as what you first told everyone it was. Didn’t think it was that bad, but… Comparatively, the argument with that purple brick dude-“

“Miguel.”

“Sí, him, and what you told me afterwards… that’s had a bigger impact so far. Not so much for your family, I think.”

“If only.”

“If only?” More plates clacking.

“Good point, that would be just as moding. I just… I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t want to make them sad; I don’t know how to tell them that it’s a different timeline, that nothing like what happen _there_ will ever happen _here_. Jay and Joan… They’re family. I live with them. They are good people, Jaime, but both of them were born way before the Second World War. Hell, Jay was born before the _First_ World War ended!”

“So you think they won’t be able to deal with it because they’re old.” Jaime summarized, setting a plate down in front of Bart’s face and stealing the now functioning and put together phone from his hand. He replaced the item he stole with a fork, and nudged the other hand until Bart accepted a knife.

“When you say it like that it sounds-“

“Stupid? It is stupid. They are your family and they love you. Love isn’t always enough, but the Garricks aren’t… they aren’t trying to live in the past. I think that’s why they’ve lived so long, they aren’t trying to make the world back into the nineteen thirties or anything.” Bart got jabbed by the prongs of a fork. “Eat.” Jaime commanded from the other side of the table.

He shoved the food in his mouth absently, noting the nice taste before swallowing and moving back to more important matters, pulling up a hand and letting an elbow provide support for his head as he talked. “I don’t… I don’t even know what to say to them.”

“What you say isn’t important. What matters is that you said it. It’s going to happen, Bart, and I know you don’t want to talk about either subject, but you can’t dodge anymore. If you do it’ll hurt them more than if you make the effort to explain.”

The plate in front of him was empty, Bart noticed. Strange. He didn’t know when that had happened. “I... don’t want to.”

“It would be easier if it was something you could fix by hitting it, wouldn’t it.”

“Mmph.”

“Bart?” Jaime tapped his elbow. Bart jerked his head up. “Are you… falling asleep?”

“Got no idea why. Possibly. Maybe. Don’t wanna.”

“Idiot. You ran out early, didn’t you?” The plate was taken away from the surface in front of him. Bart resisted the urge to pillow his head on the table. “What did you eat?”

“Eat?” Eat. Right, no, that hadn’t happened. Breakfast could possibly have been the sandwich he’d forgotten and then picked up again. “Um, yes breakfast. No lunch.”

“You ever wonder if that might be why you woke up at god knows what in the morning?”

“…huh.”

“Genius, my ass.” Hands pulled him up. Nice hands. Bart leaned into them. “Nope, nuh-uh, come on, sleep on the couch, not me.”

“Pity.” He mumbled.

“Ignoring that.” Jaime said in a resolute voice that squeaked a little.

Bart let himself be herded in what he trusted was the right direction to a well-worn couch and a pillow and two blankets, one that was warm and good and one that was thin with patterns on it. He should, he decided, ask Jaime why the second blanket hadn’t been put away to wherever Bart had found it. He should. The blanket would have to go away some time. It needed to be in its proper place. Like the technology the Team had taken from Santa Prisca. That would end up in the Batcave eventually. Next to the Reach pod. In a cave. The weapons he’d taken off the Brain would go in the Batcave. From the cave in the island to the cave under Gotham. They didn’t see daylight much. There was something wrong with that thought. Sleepily, Bart grabbed at it, wrapped a grip around the string out of place and pulled until-

“Shit!” He bolted upright, barely avoiding smashing his head into Jaime, who was hovering over him with an expression rapidly changing from quiet amusement to apprehension.

“B-“

“I forgot the Brain!” The speedster yelped over whatever Jaime was saying.

“You forgot the Brain?” Jaime said.

“I had to rescue him, put him out of the radius of the EMP, couldn’t let the pulse kill him, itwould’ve, put him on a piece of wreckage from submarineWonderWomanwasdestroying, didn’t get him BACK! I KNEW I forgot something!”


	15. Part 14

“But-“

“No.” Jaime tugged him down again. Bart was starting to feel like a tethered jack-in-the-box. “ _Not_ yet. You need to remember to _eat_.”

“I have protein bars!”

“Bars that are supposed to be for _emergencies_.” His friend stressed, eyes glinting dangerously. “What’s the point in getting you to make breakfast if you don’t eat it with me?”

“Sl-“ Slave labour. Bad word. Backtrack. “Free food?”

Jaime rolled his eyes. “Eat.”

Bart sat. Bart ate. He congratulated himself on how tasty the eggs were and he sullenly bemoaned how Jaime was _not letting him do things_. Good things, important things, things like telling someone that, hey, had he forgotten to say that there might have been a member of the Light merrily floating round the Atlantic on a piece of metal? Oops. His bad.

It was unreasonable. They should have gone out the previous night, not waited until morning. They should have called it in at the very least, they should have done _something_ , but no, no they were waiting until they had a full night’s sleep and they were eating and getting dressed and brushing their teeth and all that other stupid, optional stuff. Bart couldn’t deny that Jaime might have been right about the eating thing messing up his body as it tried to tell him that no, really, food was good, but on the other hand, villains and the Brain floating out there and they could go catch him, Bart had already taken his weapons off him, he wouldn’t be able to teleport away or whatever it was that he did, he was _there_ they should _go_ -

“Alright, we can-“

The second Jaime finished shaping the word, Bart was off. Then he was back. Then he dragged Jaime with him. Then he remembered that costumes were a good idea, and left Jaime to armour up as he darted back and put on the yellow and red, before joining his friend outside. Jaime glared at him. Bart wasn’t entirely unrepentant, but the Brain, and a mission, and they should go. The Zeta tube was in a weird place, and Kid Flash let go of his maniacal energy for a moment to wonder why the powers that decided such things had put a Zeta tube in a community vegetable garden. The greenhouse was stifling as it beeped and the world spun away.

The Martian Manhunter looked up from his study of two different displays. On the screens, the Justice League squads seemed to be, at first glance, fighting a giant squid as Aquaman tottered round in a circle on the other screen, looking either drunk, high, or under some sort of blunt hypnosis. “Blue Beetle. Kid Flash.”

“Hey, crash, cool, you know where Kaldur is? Or Batgirl?” He fidgeted awkwardly.

The Martian turned, bringing up another screen without any fuss. “Aqualad and Batgirl to the briefing room.” The announcement echoed through the loudspeakers. He shut off that screen and turned back to the pair waiting in front of the Zeta tubes. “Anything else?”

“Nope, no, na-da, we’re good, we’re crash and I’m shuttingup now.”

“You should have returned to the tower.” J’onn finally offered an opinion. “You should be here.”

“Yeah, no, never happening, I’m staying right by the exits, thank you.”

“We do not mean you harm.”

“Intent and action are very different things.” Bart said. His eyes flicked over and found a new addition to the room. “Kaldur!”

“Bart? Where have you-“

“Talky later. You know how imprisoning the Light doesn’t last long, but it’s always a good idea?” Kid Flash said rapidly.

“Yes.” Aqualad confirmed.

“Well I think I might have forgotten something. A small something. Maybe. Anyway, turns out the Brain might be swaying aimlessly across the Atlantic Ocean without weapons on a bit of Black Manta’s submarine. I think getting him might be a good idea?”

It took a while, and the inclusion of La’gann, Wonder Girl, and Miss Martian to get the story straight, but they worked it out in the end. Bart didn’t like having to repeat the story five times. Nor was he comfortable with the Martian Manhunter glancing at him occasionally. He was aware that it was both paranoid and irrational, but each time the League member who wanted him penned in looked over, Kid Flash edged a little closer to the Zeta tubes.

Finally, far slower than he’d have liked, Aqualad said he’d monitor from the Watchtower while they went to have a look. Ten minutes to get that far was too long, ages too long, although Wonder Girl made a strange face when he pointed that out. With Miss Martian leading the way they wandered slowly down to the bio-ship and floated out of the airlock, drifting serenely down toward the planet in a graceful, ponderous arc.

It got better as they approached the ground, setting up scanners for metal. Bart relaxed a little as the ship hummed and began her work. “I don’t get why Kaldur doesn’t think we’ll find anything.”

“We’re already scanning as we fly to the airspace over Santa Prisca.” Blue Beetle was lit up as he added his own abilities to the array for sensors sweeping the area below them. “But the ocean’s a big place, dude.”

“Much bigger than the land.” Lagoon Boy agreed. “I know how the currents work, better than Aqualad, but I don’t think we’ve got much chance of an easy find. If you’re right, and he is still out there, he’s had two days to float somewhere strange.”

“The Light might have rescued him.” Wonder Girl pointed out.

“The Light doesn’t have Atlantians, not proper ones.” Bart grumbled. “And they can’t fly around without being tracked by the Watchtower.”

“They have Klarion.” Miss Martian said. “He has a habit of teleporting in to rescue Savage.”

“I know. I was going to kick Savage off a cliff before he showed up.” Bart noticed the looks he got for that. “What? The guy’s immortal, he wouldn’t have died.”

“Not precisely the point, mate.” La’gann muttered. “You’re way more twitchy than usual.”

“It’s gotten better than it was on the Watchtower.” Cassie leaned forward and balanced her face on her hands, examining him.

Bart twisted in his seat, uncomfortable. “You know they tried to keep me up there.”

“Yes?” Miss Martian put in. “I thought it made sense. It was bad enough having you run off to interfere with the League, we really-“

Bart shoved his seat around, glaring at her. “No. It wasn’t a good idea, and its why I felt like a rat in a maze when I went up there just now. You know what happened on Santa Prisca? There were threats to my family until they got me to talk. I was lying, but hey, they didn’t know that. They put a collar around my neck to make sure I couldn’t run away, and they put me in a nice clean room with its own bathroom, and they fed me, and they gave me water.

“You and the others decided that it was a good idea to keep me locked in the Watchtower, on a space station, so I could not run away from your questions. I was put in a nice clean room with its own bathroom. I was fed, I was given water.” He kept his voice even, his face expressionless and it was somehow easier than it had been. “M’gann I am fully aware that it was with the best intentions, I am, but it was not the right thing to do.”

She bit her lip and looked off to the side.

“We’re over Santa Prisca.” Blue Beetle reported into the silence.

“Stop the ship.” La’gann had skills in ignoring things in favour of more important matters. They all did. “I need to go underwater, see where the currents head to.”

“I’m going down too.” Kid Flash held up a hand before anyone could say anything. “Lets face it, I’m going to be faster at searching than the rest of you.”

“We have scanners.” Jaime said it in a way that was neither judging nor suggesting anything. Just leaving another option open.

“Running will do me good.”

“Fine.” Miss Martian gave in without any heat, and two holes opened up for both Lagoon Boy and Kid Flash to slip through. “Kid Flash, stay below the speed of sound. We need to be able to contact you.”

“Got it.” He saluted and stepped forward, letting himself drop.

Bart circled the bio-ship, unable to stop running because water underfoot and all of that, waiting until La’gann dropped into the sea to head further out. With the rush to tell people and get them to _do_ something and possibly accomplish the ulterior motive of getting him off that damn Watchtower, he hadn’t really taken into account what the others had picked out within seconds. The ocean was big. The Brain was small. The Light would be searching for it too.

It was like a race, he reflected, a race to find the inhuman scientist and either lock it up or use the findings it could still remember for something else. While the Brain didn’t have data storage like a proper computer would have, it was intelligent. The sooner the Light picked it up, the more information it would be able to regurgitate, and the easier it would be to start work on replicating the time machine again. If the Brain was locked away, even the best, smartest people lost information over time.

So Kid Flash had to make sure it was taken in. Or he had to try. It was easier said than done, because in a phrase that was fast becoming a repetitive chant; the ocean was a big place.

They gave it their best shot. With the bio-ship and Blue Beetle running every scan either of them thought would help, La’gann giving them directions like it was a roadmap, Miss Martian at the helm, Kid Flash running wider searches underneath the ship and Wonder Girl loudly and frequently complaining she felt useless, they searched.

There was nothing but the waves. Not huge, crashing waves that begged to be jumped and used as ramps, but small waves, as quiet as the sea ever got, with apparently was bad according to La’gann. Lagoon Boy had to jump back into the water twice more, fins flickering out and moving with the currents in a way that made it clear to Bart which element was the Atlantian’s home. He came back up and gave instructions to Miss Martian each time, but after what Cassie informed him was three hours, they gave in to the inevitable. If the Brain was still out there, and that was a big if, they weren’t equipped to find him.

Uneasy but aware that asking his Teammates to continue with what was basically a hopeless task was unfair, Kid Flash didn’t flag up any objections when Aqualad called off the search, saying something about seeing if the Watchtowers sensors would be of any more help than the bio-ship. Bart waved off the invitation to get back into the bio-ship for the ride back up to the Watchtower, an invitation that was tinged with too much ‘we won’t lock you in, we promise’ sentiment for him to consider taking it. The others went back up into the sky, and he swerved towards land, free to go above the speed of sound as he ran.

Jaime was going back up to the Watchtower with the rest of them, and Bart didn’t begrudge him that, not at all, but just going back to his apartment and hanging around there like a bad smell didn’t seem that great of an option. Unfortunately, he was rapidly running out of smaller loose ends to tie up. The best distraction he could settle for looked to be Artemis, who was snarky and irritating and almost family, so apologising to her would be, Bart decided, an excellent start.

Palo Alto was inconveniently located in California, right at the opposite side of the country, but Kid Flash enjoyed the run, the feeling of getting up to a good speed and letting muscle memory take over, comfortable and familiar with the stretch of exercise. His mind wandered off, pondering if he could convince Artemis to give him lunch and what, if anything, it would entail. The speedster almost missed a familiar landmark, catching himself before he ran past it and swerving back on the correct course, taking the time to click on the directions in his goggles to get him to the right street and house.

He phased through the door, ran past the living room and- went back to the living room. Bart took note of the two red haired children currently smashing blocks together as they re-enacted what was either a great battle or a race between two cars. It was possible Dawn thought it a great battle, while Don seemed more convinced that the two toy cars played a starring role. Bart darted away before they saw him, intending to find Artemis and ask if he could help babysit, when he pasted the rarely-used dining room and, for a second time, ground to a halt. Oh. Jay and Artemis and Iris and Joan and Barry, all talking together, faces intent.

“Interrupted a meeting about me.” You know at _some point_ , he assumed, getting a brain-to-mouth filter would be a really _good idea_. “Sorry?”

“Bart!” He was already turning and running. No way normal noise could have reached him, and half a second later he was out of the house and cracking through the sound barrier.

It took less time then he thought it would for Barry to catch up, red costume in place and mask down. Both of them above the speed of sound, talking wasn’t on the table, but his grandfather tried to mouth something at him while Bart was resolutely not paying attention. It was harder to ignore the blatant and obvious hand signals, but he managed well enough as the world slowed down further, bringing him ahead for a moment before the Flash caught up.

With a sinking feeling that began somewhere half way down his chest and ended just below his knees (Bart was fully aware it made no sense, but there’d been only a limited amount of sense from him on a fairly consistent basis for as long as he could remember) he swerved, bringing himself at almost a right angle to his original path. The original path going who-the-fuck-knew-where, so altering his course wasn’t that much of a chore. There was water, briefly, which didn’t make a lot of sense, and the Flash catching up again, slower this time, before they hit a city.

Barry was weird. He had this strange habit of actually slowing down near civilization, and while Bart wasn’t under any impressions that he was going to win a race between them, he could mess with the rules a little bit. While they were both good at high speed thingys, which came in the job description to a certain extent, the Flash didn’t, for some reason, favour phasing through things as much as Bart did. So while the matured speedster slowed down and ran on the roads, which were never guaranteed to go in the places they promised to, Bart just ran forward into a wall, through that, and the next, and the next, still building up speed as he vibrated like a harp string.

It was entertaining to get to the other side first and wait for the Flash over at the biggest bestest motorway. Bart snagged him on the way out, hooking him and tripping him before he caught an arm and used the rest of their combined momentum to spin them to a halt, both of them upright and breathing hard. He dropped back below the speed of sound. “Hey grandpa.”

Barry blinked, in the way that only someone who was very, very used to being able to react quicker than everyone else and therefore was thoroughly and summarily disconcerted when someone else managed the same sorts of trick they pulled could do.

Bart pulled away and sat down, folding his legs underneath him to look up expectantly. On the side of a motorway wasn’t the most suitable or comfortable place to talk, but it was happening whether he liked it or not. “Questions?” Inquiries? I wouldn’t be averse to a statement promising you won’t lock me up anywhere.”

That startled Barry into talking. “We haven’t locked you up!”

“You put me on a space station and took away my ability to get off it.”

“We- I- We just wanted you where we knew you’d be safe! We still do, Bart, where have you _been_ , why did you go down to Santa Prisca on a mission?! You need time to-“

“No. You need time to heal.” In a flicker of movement, he tugged Barry down to sit with him on the ground, side by side with his yellow cloth brushing the Flash’s red suit. “I’ve had time, years of time, and the things you think cut deepest actually left fairly bloodless wounds in the first place.”

“You, you need to talk to someone! To process everything! You didn’t like talking about it, you were hurt, you-“

“I am from a different world. What you think of as monstrous was a way of life, and before I travelled to this time I didn’t know anything different. I hated talking about it. I don’t like to remember most of it, but I am less broken than you all think. You’ve only just heard about the shit that happened in what I’d like to point out is an alternate timeline, not one that’s going to repeat itself here. I lived through that shit and I’d _appreciate it,_ ” he glared, “if you’d trust me to know what is best for myself.”

“You can’t-“

“Drop it, Flash.” Bart leaned into his grandfather’s side, actions at odds with the tone of his words. “You aren’t going to win this argument.”

“But you-“

There was an not-inconsiderable list of things Bart would do to get his mentor off that particular subject, but when thought flitted through his head and snagged on something, catching his attention, he went with it. It was as good as anything else. “Do you know you can never touch someone?”

The rant about his mental health stuttered to a halt as his statement was processed. “What?”

“You can never touch someone. Not really.” Bart shifted against Barry’s side, burrowing under his arm and closer to his ribcage, feeling the warmth that leaked from him. “Sounds strange, I know, but you can’t.”

“What are you talking about? Of course you can.” Debate successfully derailed, the Flash’s voice was calmer in their little bubble of speed and more gentle.

“You can’t. No one can.” He said absently. “You are never actually touching anything. Your atoms' electrons repel objects when they are ten to the power of minus eight meters away from you, but you can feel the force of the resistance. That’s what you interpret as touch. It’s the pressure of other things coming close to you, but never quite meeting your skin, not ever, not really. That is what touch _is_. We don’t think it’s that way. We think that everything meets each other, that somehow if you’ve got your hand in someone else’s, your atoms are skating along each other, meeting and communicating, maybe. But it’s not. You can and will never touch anything at all, not the way you think you might.”

“That’s… interesting, but I don’t see how its… relevant.” Barry said, and fair point to him.

“It was relevant when I thought of it.” Bart countered. “It’s hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering any reasons for them I may or may not discount as soon as they’re out of my mouth.”

“The middle of that sounded like a quote.”

“Friedrich Nietzsche.”

“…Right?”

“Oh, crash.” He snapped the fingers of the arm not sort of trapped by his position close to Barry. “Reason found! I think. Yeah, you think we’re touching, but we aren’t touching, not in the way people normally think of it. You think I’m shattered and traumatised, that that is how my life has affected me, but I’m not, not in the way people normally think of it.”

“Bart, you can’t just be fine with everything. That isn’t possible.”

“I’m not saying it hasn’t affected me,” the teenager gave up that ground, “I’m saying it hasn’t affected me like you think it has. My jokes, my inability to take almost anything seriously, the way I can’t stop moving and fidgeting, how I need to make something to relax, or run, what I know about things I shouldn’t know about, that doesn’t come out of nowhere. That’s what my past made me. It made me, um, me, and I know that, I do, and I realise that I’m irrationally frightened of being locked up, even if the people doing the locking are trying to act in my best interests, and I know I’m too vicious when I get backed into a corner, I just…

“I didn’t tell you.” It felt easier to mumble the words into Barry’s suit. “I hate knowing you’re going to look at me and you’ll think, here, this is because of his slavery, and this is because he lost his parents, and this is because he had to learn fast to survive. And here, look, this is behaviour that evolved because of us, it’s better isn’t it. But look at him here, oh dear, it must be my fault for not stopping this, or doing that. To a large extent, your past makes you who you are, but you won’t be looking at who I am, you’ll be looking at my past when you see me, and Bart won’t even register.”

“You don’t… know that.” The Flash sighed.

“It’s already started.”

“It has. I can see that, I can… putting you up on the Watchtower isn’t looking like a good idea anymore.”

“I do freak the fuck out, don’t I.”

“No.” Barry denied. “It isn’t that. Putting you… locking you, you’re right actually, that verb works better. Locking you up there probably wasn’t ever going to help you in the first place. It was to comfort us, to reassure us we could keep an eye on you, to have you there if we wanted you, to make it easier for us to confront you when you’d already made very clear that confrontation isn’t an enjoyable thing for you to go through. It was for us.”

“I don’t begrudge you that.” Bart said softly. “Well, no, I do, because being locked somewhere sucked, but I can understand why you did it.”

“We should be focused on helping you. Not making things worse.”

“You want to help?” Bart snorted. “I have a missing Brain drifting somewhere in the Atlantic if the Light haven’t found it yet, and sending it off to confinement would really truly make it easier to sleep at night without worrying that someone’s trying to copy my time machine. We just spent three hours flying round in the bio-ship looking, and there’s been fuck all out there except for waves.”

Barry shifted, not uncomfortably, but like he was considering getting up to run. “That’s what would make you feel better?”

“My time machine, my mess, and its taking way too long to clean up.”

“Alright.”

Bart jerked his head up to look at him, forehead furrowing. “What?”

“Alright.” The Flash repeated, getting up and hauling Kid Flash to his feet with him. “Let’s do this.”

“Wha-“

“Keep up if you can, Kid.” He disappeared.

Bart took a movement to find his feet before Kid Flash snapped into his own speed, catching up and following the fast receding red blur until they were side by side, several times above the speed of sound. There was a little, tiny bit of malicious joy in Barry’s face as Bart was forced to descend to strange gestures, trying to get his mentor to stop and explain just what they were doing, or where they were headed.

Central City, apparently. Familiar roads and even more familiar structures as they darted through stone and brick and man-made metal, Kid Flash hot on the older speedster’s heels. The police building was laughably easy to get in to, and even with the whole running through walls advantage they both had, Bart thought the security measures inside were inadequate and dangerous with how much they let slip through.

Barry led him into a laboratory, the two speedsters the only people within sight as the Flash stopped running and darted into a cupboard, coming out dressed in civilian clothes. Bart, after quickly poking at a beeping computer, stopped too. “Why do you have a store of clothes in there?”

“I’m a crime scene investigator. This is a crime scene laboratory.”

“Fine, why’re we at your workplace then?”

“I am a _crime scene investigator_.” Barry bent over a microscope, twiddling with one of the knobs. “If I can find a bullet based on how a person ducked when it was fired from a gun, I can find the Brain.”

“Oh. _Oh_ , wait, you can?” Bart darted over to can what he was doing, accidentally memorising the password his grandfather typed into the computer. “Crash!”

“Well, it is the ocean, and that’s a whole other ballpark than dry land, but we have friends to call in there if I get stuck.” Barry turned to him. “Are you sure this is what I can do to help? You don’t want me to, um, talk to you about thing or-“

“Nope, no, done enough talking, but this, this is crash!” Bart might have hopped up and down on his heels. If he had, the Flash wouldn’t tell. “I’d verymuchlikeit if you did this, yes, this is perfect!”

“You really want the Brain taken in, don’t you.”

“It’s been trying to _steal_ my _time machine_. Duh.”

“Fair reason, I guess.” He started typing something in, his hands blurring over the keyboard.

Bart got out of his way. “Anything I can do?”

“Just wait. This might take a couple minutes.”

Minutes, as it turned out, was wrong. It would have been more accurate to measure that time in hours, as Barry tried to wade his way through rapidly learning how water took things places they just didn’t go on land. Contrary to his usual self, Bart didn’t mind. That had less to do with any sudden lessons in patience and more to do with the fact that, for the time being while his mentor worked, he was stuck in a huge laboratory filled with cutting edge police technology. The terrible horror of it all quickly sent him into spams of glee as he pressed buttons and made things whirr and even, as Barry got stuck into work and barely looked up, managed to take apart an analyser and put it back together again minus a few parts that were useless in the first place. If they had put the analyser under a bench to gather dust, Bart reasoned, no one would be to upset if he poked at it.

When he turned the analyser back on it briefly made a very high pitched and wrong trilling noise. Very, very briefly, because Bart had done his absolute level best to make sure it was off almost instantaneously, covering it up carefully and thanking whatever god the religious people were always debating about when Barry didn’t notice.

Yet more time was wasted by finding those useless, purposeless spare parts he’d taken out in the first place and carefully putting them back in.

Barry left and came back with lunch just in time for Bart to drop the piece of plastic he was working on screwing into place with a slide from the microscope and stand upright, smiling carefully. The Flash took a double take at him, and zipped over. “What.” He said expectantly.

“Nothing, nothing, whywouldyoueventhinkthat nothing.”

“Bart. That smile is honestly disturbing, because I don’t think I’d know anything was wrong if you weren’t holding your arms behind your back like that and you didn’t have oil all over your face.”

“Oil?” He found something reflective. Sure enough there was a black smear marring one side of his forehead. “Huh. I didn’t know that thing even had oil in it. How’d that happen?”

“More importantly- give me that, why do you have a microscope slide- yes, more importantly, what thing are you talking about?”

“Um.”

Barry lowered his best disapproving parent look.

“That one.” Bart pointed at it.

Barry rescued the analyser. “Bart, you can’t you taking things apart.”

“I’m not.” He retorted, than stuck out his tongue at the look he got in return. “What?! I’m not; I was putting it back _together_. For the, um, second time.”

“Second-“ Barry ran a hand over his face. “We need that stuff, when we’re not tracking the Brain this is a _crime lab_. You know, one that solves crimes.”

“I know, I know.” Kid Flash chanted, liberating the analyser and booting it up before Barry could protest. It beeped happily, and he patted it. “Look, it works fine. I built an EMP, I’m good at taking things apart and putting them back together again.”

Barry deflated, tossing over lunch as he padded back to the computer he’d been working on. Bart tore into the food and followed him. “I’ll accept that, if only so I don’t need to hear anything else. Come look at this.”

He peered over the other hero’s shoulder. “And this is…”

“Computer program. _Very_ good, we received it from the Wayne foundation- Why are you coughing?”

“Food went down the wrong way,” Bart choked, desperately hiding a smile behind his hand. “I’m fine, keep talking.”

“Yeah, I think our name was drawn out of a hat or something. Not just any lab has this stuff. Anyway, it can handle water to a certain extent by taking readings from floaters that I think the coastguard uses usually. Its more reliable than the bigger picture stuff the Watchtower will give me. I’ll call in one of our Atlantian friends to help me sift through the data once the program’s run.”

“Once it’s _run_?! What has it been doing this entire time, warm up stretches?!”

“Hey, usually I have ten people with me working this thing!”

“You have _superspeed_.” Bart snarked.

“I can’t use it here!”

“Why not? There’s no one looking except for me, and, hello, yellow and red suit? A lightning bolt over my chest? I think I might already know.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, you forgot the Brain was out there at all, on balance you’re the one that’s forgotten the bigger thing.”

Bart leap feet first into a counter argument and the conversation descended from there.

Eventually, and who knew how long it really had been, they tired of the familiar push and pull of the squabble, and like seagulls settling down after a fight over a stick of bread the two speedsters split up, one going back to a house in Palo Alto, hopefully carrying the message that Kid Flash wasn’t any more crazy than what he existed as normally, the other heading back to Jaime’s apartment.

Not that he’d told Barry where he was going. Bart didn’t know where they thought he was staying, but he wasn’t going to actively point it out. It wasn’t not-telling them. He just… wasn’t pointing it out. Besides, Jaime had fed him the night before, it was his turn to cook now, or something like that. He phased through the door, and checking, found it unlocked again, which didn’t get any less stupid or pointless the second time around.

Two hours later, the kitchen might have conceivably had a counter top underneath all the pots and pans, but if it had, Bart thought he’d have to start and epic quest to find it. He gave up and texted Jaime.

 _New phone, is KF._ It read. _I swear I can clean it up._

Hat pretty much guaranteed a response as soon as Jaime saw it. Sure enough, it took five minutes for the phone to begin blaring its tune. Bart snapped it up to his ear, thankful that he’d remember to get into civilian clothes some time before. Quite apart from the lightning bolts which would have made it hard to take a phone call and hear it, he’d also got a sort of fascinating mixture of food over his clothes, so at least he didn’t have to dry clean his costume now. “Hello?”

“Bart, what do you think you can clean up?!”

“Chill, dude. It’s food, notexpolsives. I thought it was my turn to make dinner and… um, I don’t know if it turned out so well.”

“It’s food? But then why were you able to text me?!”

“Because I have a phone? And phones can do that?”

“Not normal ones.” Jaime sighed on the other end of the line.

Bart frowned. “It’s just texting!”

“It’s texting a space station. In orbit. I don’t know about the others, but my phone doesn’t work up here. I had to ask the scarab to send this call to you.”

“Why’d you even have a phone if the scarab-“

“How do you text from something that’s implanted in your spine?”

“Point.”

“Alright. Since you’ve clearly been working on your phone, what happened to the food?”

“I got frustrated.” Bart admitted. “Something was taking too long to cook so I went back to fiddling with my cell. And then I got distracted. And then the thing might have burnt.”

“That isn’t too bad.”

“No, no its not, but Jaime?” He poked at the little white puffs sitting on the table as he talked. “I don’t know how, but I think I might have made mashed potato meringues. I really, really don’t know how.”

“That’s… okay, that is odd.”

“Yeah, and they’re the only thing I actually managed to make edible, which I think might have been the point of the exercise. The rest didn’t turn out so good.”

“Why do I trust you to walk around on your own?”

“You don’t.” He grinned. “You just haven’t found a good enough leash yet.”

“Alright, you deal with the mess.” Jaime decided. “I’ll order in some Chinese or something when I get back.”

“Sounds good.” Bart replied, making a face at the mounds of silverware he’d just agreed to clean. “See you when I see you then.”

“Right, bye.” The call cut off.

The dishes were boring, but he stuck to his promise and cleaned them all. It might have been quick to other people, but from his point of view it still took ages to get them all cleaned, the ones that would fit stacked in the dishwasher and any other scrubbed and dried and all the rest of it and then put back into their drawers. With the dishwasher humming tunelessly as it worked behind him, he started taking apart his phone again.

Jaime turned up when the light sneaking in through his windows told Bart that it was still early, still before sunset, in fact, although the clouds and drizzle hid most other signs of that. The light was orange as the sun reflected onto the clouds and the clouds trapped that tone under their thick blanket, making a world that was surreal, red and yellow tinged with rain. It had to be one of the oddest things he’d seen, weather that didn’t happen in Central City. He tested his phone’s camera out on it, before deciding that yes the camera definitely needed an upgrade.

The smell had him running before his friend could call him in, pouncing on the little disposable containers of food as Jaime hung up his coat neatly to dry. “Foooood.”

“The kitchen clean?” Jaime asked warningly.

“Done, and I kept the potato meringues.”

“Shouldn’t a speedster know how to cook?”

“Chinese fast food.” He purred happily, letting himself be yanked away from the entrance and shoved in the direction to the couch he’d claimed for a temporary bed.

When Jaime tried to liberate the take out from him Bart hissed, batted at the invading hands like an irate cat. With a shrug, the older one of the pair gave up on the idea of getting Bart to relinquish the food and went to fetch plates, putting them down in front of the couch. “No getting food on my stuff.” He warned.

“Shouldn’t we eat at the table then?” Bart suggested.

“Nah. We can watch a movie.” Jaime went through the list of recorded shows, picking one and pressing play. “We’ll probably be called in later anyway, at least this way we won’t fall asleep.”

“Called in?” Bart picked out his half of the food. “What about?”

“As usual, it’s all your fault.” Jaime grinned, the insulted not meant to cut or hurt. “The Flash and La’gann were going on about a tracking program, to go pick up the Brain. Black Canary did some digging, and no one in the criminal world knows anything about where the Brain is, plus Ra’s al Ghul and Lex Luthor are putting out inquiries. It doesn’t look like the Light have picked him up.”

“So now we’ve got proof suddenly everyone’s on my side?”

“Pretty much. Black Canary was going on about convincing you to come to her for counselling.”

“Again?” He snorted. “She needs to figure out that’s not going to win her any favours from me.”

“The good news is, La’gann told her that, and some of the others backed him up-”

“Oh, most rare of occasions, people are agreeing with Lagoon Boy.”

“You’ve got people on your side, Bart.” Jaime elbowed him.

“I get it, I do. Think I’ll still stay away from the Watchtower for a while though, no offence.”

“None taken. Are you going to eat that rice?”

The call came in at half past eleven, just as the film was starting to trundle towards its conclusion. Jaime’s armour rippled outward and Bart shot up, whirring into his own uniform. “This is Kid Flash.” He reported into his communicator. “You people ready to go Brain hunting? God, thatmaksme sound likea zombie.”

“This is the Flash.” Barry sounded smug. “We’ve got what we need. Should have known you’d turn up for the chase, kid.”

“Yeah, you should’ve. That program is _slow_.”

“Still faster than searching an ocean on foot.”

“…Maybe.” Bart allowed. “Where am I headed?”

“The bio-ship and supercycle are en-route.” Kaldur cut in.

“Me and Kid Flash will go meet them.” Blue Beetle said.

An acknowledgement over the comms, and a set of coordinates rattled off, and they were on the move. Bart let Jaime lead, partly to be polite, mostly because, as ever, Blue Beetle was a whole lot more likely than Kid Flash to know where they were going.

He laughed as they reached water and he sped up, skimming across the waves. When Jaime flew over a big one Bart accelerated, leaping, using the massive ramp of water to propel himself into the air and past Blue Beetle’s face. His friend swerved in shock, but recovered, either through the assistance of the scarab or through long, hard fought practise. Blue swooped down and caught him before he hit the waves again, and Bart relaxed a little into his hold. Flying inside a pod wasn’t crash, didn’t give him any distractions or any of the information he gleaned from running. Being held under Blue Beetle while his jetpack blasted them through the sky was different. Still not as crash as running himself, but crash in a different way, maybe.

They weren’t the first to arrive at the designated point. Both the Supercycle and the bio-ship were hovering over the waves, and they weren’t unoccupied. Aqualad and Lagoon Boy were already in the water, La’gann’s fins waving and Kaldur only a vague red splotch, distorted by the meter of water between him and the surface. Superboy and Wolf hung out in the Supercycle, looking almost but not quite bored enough to get a reprimand for it. Blue Beetle landed them both on the roof of the bio-ship and let go a little more awkwardly than was really necessary, reminding Kid Flash of the thing they weren’t talking about.

As soon as he was released, Bart vibrated, falling through to land neatly inside the cabin of the ship. Beast Boy squawked, feathers shifting out and then disappearing back into his usual fur as his shape flickered a little. “Why’d you do that?!”

Bart waited for a chair to form out of liquid metal whatever-it-was and sat down cautiously, giving the ship a grateful pat. “Easiest way to get in.”

“Phasing through the roof is the easiest way to get in?” Nightwing commented from where he was perched close to a gigantic keyboard, plugged in via an attachment to his glove.

“It’s shivering. Sort of.” That was the simplest way to explain it. “Why’re you and Kaldur here? Shouldn’t one of you be on mission control?”

“Mal’s taking care of it. I’m here because Red Robin and I are both experts in sorting through data for the one bit that’ll turn out to be useful. M’gann and Garfield are here to operate the bio-ship, as is Superboy with the cycle. La’gann and Kaldur are here to read the ocean’s currents or whatever they do. Blue’s been called in because he’s got use as much tech at his disposal than either the ship or the cycle. You’re here because we’ve all noticed how possessive you are about his particular issue, and the Flash recommended we tell you what’s happening.” He paused. “I’m not actually sure why Wolf was brought along. Maybe he needed a walk?”

“Why isn’t the Flash down here with us?” Beast Boy piped up with his own question.

“Oh, oh, I can answer that one!” Kid Flash stuck up his hand like an excited child in class. “Because he’s the one that narrowed down our search area. Once we’ve crossed places off he’ll use the data and factor it into everything else. Or at least I think that’s how it works. Point is he’s giving directions, not taking them.”

“I didn’t know he had an interest in search areas.” M’gann said for her position at the helm of the ship.

“He doesn’t. Well, he does.” Bart corrected himself as Jaime strode in from the outside. “Civilian stuff. I asked him to help.”

“Every so often,” Nightwing leaned back in his chair, “I remember that you speedster people are actually intelligent as well as talkative clowns.”

“Not to interrupt that musing,” Blue’s arm lit up as he talked, armour expanding and building itself into something, “but how many sensors do you want.”

“Everything you’ve got, tin man.” Beast Boy smirked. “Bet the bio-ship can still see further than you.”

“No, that wasn’t a challenge.” Jaime said to a point over his shoulder.

“Yes it was.” A green tail smacked the blue armoured pates along his arm.

From the expression that prompted on Jaime’s face, the scarab as keen to prove itself. Also probably spurting threats to humanity, but Jaime had told Bart years ago that they were less serious and more just the default language of his artificial intelligence. Or so they both hoped. Certainly, the scarab hadn’t tried to kill anyone on any of the dozen times he’d been forced to take over his host body in a dire situation.

“Bart?” He swivelled his chair around to face Miss Martian. “Are you okay if I put up a psychic link or…”

“Fine.” The teenager grinned. Although the gentle treatment grated on him, it was probably a good question to ask.

“Alright. Remember, it’s only your thought, no images or memories or anything, so-“

“I know, M’gann. We’ve done hundreds of mission together; I think we’d all know by now if I was accidentally spilling memories everywhere.”

“Go on, niña verde, set it up.” Blue Beetle’s eyes were unfocused, looking at information only he could see. “He’s fine.”

M’gann blinked, slowed, then, _Link established._

 _Thank you, Miss Martian._ Kaldur’s mind-voice had tinges of the deep seated strength he carried around. _Team, should you go out of range, use your communicators. Otherwise the link will keep the occupants of the bio-ship in communication. Superboy will take the Supercycle to the edge of the bio-ship’s sensors, to expand the range we can see. La’gann has decided upon the most likely course._

 _South by a heading of thirty six point seven degrees._ Lagoon Boy reported as both Atlantians boarded the ship. _Or, to put it another way, that-ish way, go there._

 _Let’s get started_. Nightwing thought steadily.

After the first half-hour, Bart began to emit a constant hum of uselessness, sitting in a chair and looking blankly at displays he didn’t understand. _Can I go out there? Please? It’ll help increase the search radius or whatever._ Actually, wait, no. It wouldn’t because they were relying mostly on technology, but that brought up a different sort of point. _Why isn’t Jaime out there?_

Blue Beetle’s attention shifted away from whatever he was looking at to Kid Flash. _What do you mean?_

_You’re chock full of sensors, but you’re sitting in the bio-ship. If you were out to the side like the Supercycle-_

_Kid Flash has a point_. Red Robin thought quietly above a background hum of bits of data floating along the surface of his mind.

 _Agreed._ Kaldur decided. _Blue Beetle, you go out to the east. Kid Flash, you may run. You could pick up something we do not, who knows?_

 _I probably won’t, but thanks_. Bart got up from his seat and Blue Beetle mimicked him, both going to stand near the back as an entrance opened and the bio-ship flew close to the waves. The mind link cut out, leaving them alone in their heads.

Blue stepped out first, wings flaring out before a jetpack moved to replace them. Kid Flash dropped to the waves after him, feet hitting the water and swerving away to follow Blue Beetle. When his Teammate found and took up a position miles away from the bio-ship, Bart occupied himself with combing backwards and forwards, in an exercise he told himself was definitely not pointless. That distraction lasted almost twenty minutes before he got bored of it. The streak of yellow and red left Blue Beetle to his steady progress and skipped back towards the others. The bio-ship hadn’t been ecstatically amusing either, but going past it to check in with the Supercycle couldn’t hurt.

Boring as it was, it was work that had to be done, so he wasn’t going to complain. He wanted to be there when the Brain was picked back up because he had to get the machine locked up. He had to tie up the loose ends. In the darkness Kid Flash passed the lone lights shining from the bio-ship, thinking. It wasn’t only the Light. The reason the League was happy to chivvy Aqualad off to lead a Team to find the Brain wasn’t out of selflessness. Or it might have been, but Bart didn’t have that much faith in humanity. It was better to expect the worst and be surprised then the other way around.

The Brain had all of the information on the time machine that still existed uncorrupted. Even without a place to store that data but for the organic means in the human organ floating around in the criminal’s mechanical box, it would still remember a whole lot of useful information. Members of the Light never slept in prison beds for long. They slept still less if they had something to trade. The information the Brain carried wasn’t only prized by the Light, it would also be useful to the League. Bart had fried every last bit of the electronics on Santa Prisca, if the League wanted a time machine they wouldn’t be finding any help from there, but the Brain, the Brain was an opportunity.

It was good, that the most elaborate answers Kid Flash had given the criminal were lies. Good, but he still wanted to help take his forgotten mess in, to minimise how much interference the League had the opportunity to exert. He knew that was discarding most of the morals and rules that the League proclaimed loyalty to in favour of comparing them to criminals. However, a month ago he’d been so, so sure that it was not common knowledge that he was a time traveller. He’d been so confident that no one ever would know that the strange machine that had taken him to the past, so conveniently put in a mountain due to blow up, was his own creation. He’d been wrong there. Preparing for the worse seemed like a good idea.

The night vision on his goggles picked out the Supercycle’s lights in the distance, and Kid Flash hopped over the waves toward the specks of white. He was aware that forgetting to eat for however long and then getting surprised when his body didn’t automatically have a good night’s sleep was strange. He was aware that, mostly likely, the Justice League would never corrupt themselves in the ways he was thinking of and let go of their morals like that. Refusing to go up to the Watchtower once people had promised that they wouldn’t lock him in was stupid. Avoiding talking to Jay and Joan, but leaving paintings spattered all over his room in their house was silly.

Rationality didn’t play such a big part in those things. From a detached, unbiased point, viewing his actions or decisions with a lens that could remove his own experiences and wants they made no or little sense. Bart knew that, but it was a different story inside the soup of hormones and young idiocy he walked around in. The stories he’d told had been pulled out of him, long buried and understood hurts pulled into the light, and that might have been part of it, but mostly it was other old things. Instincts that had kept him alive and safe, woken up when the inhibitor collar had been put on his neck, not easily put back to sleep.

He pushed that track of thoughts away, derailing it. There wasn’t much point in sullenly brooding. If he couldn’t have changed it, he shouldn’t have worried about it. The Supercycle grew closer out of the dark, gliding close to the wave tops with Wolf in the front sat. Bart ran alongside it just within the circle of light it gave off until the canine’s head swivelled round and barked a greeting.

Permission granted, Bart hopped aboard, balancing on one of the wheel arches. “Hey Superboy.”

It was hard to sneak up on a clone with super hearing. Like Wolf, his Teammate wasn’t surprised to see him. Superboy grunted a greeting, and resumed tapping at the screen in front of him.

“Aw, come on.” It wasn’t whining if no one was there to call it whining. “You’ve got to be just as bored as me. What’s on your screen that’s so special amazing?”

“Not what’s on my screen.” Superboy progressed to words, an astounding achievement. “What’s not on it.”

“So?”

“Wolf barked a few miles back and-“ He jerked his head up to glare at Bart. “Wait. Was that you?”

“Me? No. I was underneath Blue Beetle, or passing the bio-ship maybe, this is the first time I’ve come near you.” He crawled up the cycle, coming up behind the clone to stare at the screen. “It all looks normal to me dude.”

“You have barely any idea of how Sphere works, stop talking.” Superboy dismissed him. “But it is all normal, yeah.”

“But Wolf barked.”

“That’s why I’m confused.”

“Did he smell something?”

Superboy graced him with a glare that spelled out Bart’s deficient intelligence. “In the middle of the ocean with sea-spray being blown in his face?”

“Sorry, sorry. Fine. No then. Could he’ve seen something then? He’s better at night-looking than we are, right?”

Again with the glare. “He can’t see as many colours as us, and he’s _not a cat_. Wolves can smell better and hear better, not-“ Superboy stopped in the middle of his sentence. “Hear better. He can hear better, better than humans, better than the cycle, he can hear better than _me_. Wolf, did you hear something?”

The canine twisted in his seat and barked. Apparently that was an affirmative, because Superboy sent the cycle screeching to a halt. “This is Superboy.” He snapped into his communicator. “I might have got something. Stay in position, it might be a false alarm, but I’m going to go investigate. I have Kid Flash with me.”

Over the communicator a round of acknowledgments echoed, and the cycle was turned around, streaming back the way it came. “Wolf’s hearing is really better than yours?” Bart asked, debating whether to sit in the back and wait or hop out and keep pace with the cycle, a rising tide of anticipation making him twitchy.

“A normal wolf can hear stuff from six miles away in a forest, ten miles out in the open.” Superboy reported, providing a suitable distraction for Kid Flash. “We’re out in the open here, the sea’s pretty flat, its night, there aren’t many distractions. Plus Wolf isn’t normal; he’s enhanced by kobra venom. Sphere, show where we were when Wolf barked the first time.”

The Supercycle made the strange trilling beep she talked in and a dot came up on the screen Bart could still see over Conner’s shoulder. Unfortunately, the not-a-pilot Kid Flash didn’t know which of the other dots they were, and having a destination wasn’t that useful without having a starting point.

With Bart waiting in tense, still silence behind him, Superboy eventually slowed the craft down, hovering above what you like just another stretch of rippling seawater. “What-“ Bart started.

“Shh. Quiet. We need to listen.”

He shut up without further instruction. Kid Flash waited while Wolf’s ears twitched and rotated. He got the feeling that had his appendages been able to do so, Superboy would be doing the same thing, head tilting from side to side as the kryptonian presumably tried to snatch the mysterious noise out of the empty air Wolf had spotted it from. Bart couldn’t hear anything but the quiet hush of waves and an almost inaudible hum as the Supercycle hovered above the sea.

A quick, almost yappy bark from Wolf. Their four legged Teammate clambered out of his seat, heading toward the side of the Supercycle, and barked again more confidently. Conner turned the cycle to point in the direction Wolf was indicating, and Wolf ran to the front, sticking his nose in the air for a second before looking back with a pointed expression questioning exactly why the stupid hairless apes on board weren’t heading in his chosen direction already.

“Yeah, he’s found something.” Superboy piloted the cycle forward.

“Just out of curiosity,” Bart asked. “Could you hear anything?”

The older hero gritted his teeth, but answered honestly. “Nothing.”

Bart kept quiet, waiting in the back, quivering with what wasn’t excitement as the cycle sped across the waves with Wolf standing solidly at the bow. He was half out of his seat, on the balls of his feet and eyeing the edge of the circle of light from the cycle steadily when the Supercycle veered, jerking to a halt and unseating him. Bart flew out of his seat, grabbed the edge of a construct and a bit of Superboy’s shirt to avoid a dip in the see. Wolf wasn’t so lucky, flying  off his perch and into the water with a disgruntled yelp.

“What was THAT for?!” Bart scrambled back into place, making sure he was less likely to fall out. Wolf, clambering back onto the cycle, huffed his agreement.

“Shh.” Superboy said absently.

When the cycle started moving again it was with more direction, a more stable heading. The clone must have gotten within range of whatever noise he and his dog were tracking. Although Bart was happy to have more confirmation that the mysterious noise existed, he hunkered down further into the seat to avoid any other nearly-getting-wet mishaps. It was night, and they were far from land, and more worryingly the ocean was bone chillingly cold.

Their target came into view. Kid Flash sucked in a breath, focusing in on the lonely circle of light drifting along the waves. Without any more consultation from Superboy or suggestions taken into account he jumped off the side of the Supercycle, hitting the water and beginning to move forward under his own power once again. The minimum speed needed to keep him running on top of rather than through the liquid was far beyond what the cycle was travelling at, and he jolted forward, leaving the aircraft behind him.

The wreckage of the submarine wasn’t altogether curved, or even particularly big. Even with fairly calm, cooperative seas, it should have sunk, but for the small and numerous pockets within the two sheets of steel, pockets that were intended to be filled up with water to make a not-broken machine sink or pumped full or air to make it rise. When the submarine had been assaulted by any one of various pissed of superheroes, automatic locks had kicked in, shutting off the compartments filled with air. Despite the raft not being a very seaworthy vessel, it had stayed floated and undamaged with its passenger safe.

Bart assessed the Brain. Apart for superficial scratches, most of which Kid Flash could claimed responsibility for, it was fine. It had given up on its wheels, and in an attachment Kid Flash hadn’t noticed, sunk spikes out of the formerly circular structures to anchor itself to the wreckage, which explained why it hadn’t just rolled off the side. The source of the noise Wolf and Superboy had heard was fairly easy to figure out.

The Brain was complaining. Loudly. It didn’t have a loudspeaker, but it almost didn’t need it, broadcasting the mimicry of a human voice it used at what would have been a scream, had the voice not sounded more like it was conversing. Just another thing to add to the list of disconcerting and slightly creepy things about the metal cylinder. Bart hopped aboard the raft.

“-UR DAYS IN THE SEA AND THE SALT, IT IS VERY BAD FOR MY JOINTS, YOU IGNORANT STUPID LITTLE BOY, SPEEDSTER SO STUPID. I DO NOT CARE IF THIS IS AN ATTEMPT TO GET ME TO TALK, YOUR LEAGUE SHALL NOT-“

“Shut up, tin can. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you aren’t important enough for us to do this just to get you to talk.” Bart spread his hands wonderingly. The Brain stopped in his rant to listen. “I just forgot about you. Sorry.”

“You, you, you IMBECILIC-“

“Oh do be quiet.” He growled, stalked the short distance over to the metal case. “You just said the salt’s bad for your casing. I made Savage _bleed_. Turn your speaker off and be grateful I rescued you, because that’s what this is, and that’s why you were put out to sea in the first place. After you left, I set off an EMP.”

“Lies.” The machine drawled.

“You’ll get confirmation soon enough.” He lifted his head to where the Supercycle approached.

The spitting itinerary of insults began up again, this time more focused on Bart and his intelligence than an unidentified opponent. Kid Flash ignored the tirade. Out of any of the many speeches he’d heard of late, the Brain’s ranked somewhere below Jaime’s speech about eating properly in terms of importance.

When the Supercycle drew up, Superboy looked both raft-goers over, holding a hand up to his communicator. “This is Superboy. We’ve got him. Confirm, we have the Brain, unless there’s another reason we’re out in the ocean sweeping about at night we can all go home.”

“You do not have me.” The Brain hissed inorganically as Wolf cautiously tested whether or not it was a good idea to hop onto the raft.

None of the rescue team was very impressed with that declaration. “You really want to stay here?” Superboy questioned rhetorically.

“Also, you don’t get a choice.” Bart stalked forward. “Unfasten your wheels and be cooperative while I strap you down into the Supercycle, or I’ll vibrate my hand against your support struts until they break, at which point you will probably fall into the ocean. And even that won’t be much of an obstacle, because we have two Atlantians who would be happy to haul you out of the water.”

Perhaps sensing a little tinge of inevitability about the situation, the Brain made its decision, retracting the spikes keeping it anchored to the submarine wreckage. Kid Flash swooped in and faltered before he adjusted to how heavy the construct was, pushing it up into the Supercycle with help from Wolf and a good deal less grace than was preferable. The cycle shifted, helping shove the Brain into the front seat formerly occupied by Wolf, and constrains wove themselves into existence. Bart tried not to feel creeped out by that.

“So you’ve uh, got this under control? I’ll run along under you, yeah?” He suggested.

Superboy didn’t pay attention. “Aqualad, where do we take him?”

The comm lines cracked, and their leader spoke up to give them their orders. “Belle Rave has a cell prepared. The bio-ship will meet up with you, Blue Beetle, return to the ship.”

“Got it.” Blue Beetle acknowledged. “On my way, meet you guys by the Supercycle.”

Things progressed quicker from there, a dam holding back activity broken and the world transformed into short orders and meetings of crafts hovering above the dark sea. The bio-ship stayed with its cargo of heroes, while the Supercycle had Aqualad transferred over to it to watch the Brain. Blue Beetle turned up and was absorbed back into the bio-ship, and the group set off, all bound for Belle Rave Penitentiary, and from there, home.

Bart wanted to join the others, to get to talk, to not have to watch a villain in tense silence on the off chance Aqualad could be angling for some alone time with the machine. But for all the many cycles of denial and knowledge that the other heroes would never give up their ideals, it wasn’t quite enough. He had to see the Brain being put into its cell for himself.

The flight to Belle Rave was silent. If the Brain had any more insults left, it saw the value of not antagonizing its captors and stayed its metaphorical tongue. With how early it had been removed from the action on Santa Pricsa, Kid Flash knew that it couldn’t know what had happened there, or how that fight had ended, but if the Light had won, they’d have picked up their errant member instead of the League fetching it. It had enough information to work out that it was on the losing side.

Belle Rave was as imposing and bureaucratic as ever. Kid Flash had never seen one without the other, either the prison was tightly locked up and secure, or the inmates were plotting an escape and the paperwork went smoothly. Determined to wait it out and guard the Brain until it was locked up in the cell reserved for but so rarely inhabited by the creature, he let his head rest on his hands as he watched Kaldur fill out forms. Determined, yes. Actually interested in the working of the prison? No, no, not so much. His tapping started up again as he waited. Three-four, the ninth one. Then five-five, the tenth one. Eight-nine, then jumping into the hundreds, one-four-four. Rapping his hand on the shell of the Supercycle kept him from doing anything as disastrous as talking to pass the time.

The logistics were finally worked out, and the Brain handed over. Bart popped his head up to watch, but when Aqualad turned his back and returned to the Supercycle, leaving the transferral to the prison guards, Kid Flash elected not to get out. The last he saw of the Brain glowing in its salt-encrusted metal casing was a short glimpse of it turning to a security guard before it was swamped in the uniformed bodies around it and disappeared from view.

The Supercycle took off again. It met up with the bio-ship. Various people yawned and muttered and requested drop offs at the nearest Zeta-tube, and Kid Flash stayed silent through it all. He followed Jaime when he flew out of the bio-ship, zipping through the Zeta-tube after him and back into the correct city, off to his friend’s apartment. Once in there he got changed.

Someone put a hand on his shoulder. Bart yelped, spinning around before realising that it was only Jaime. Which was expected, because he was at Jaime’s apartment and that made sense, didn’t it.

“…Bart? You didn’t hear a word I just said, did you?”

Jaime had been talking? “No.”

“Right. Well I was _saying_ , are you sure you’re okay? You’re completely out of in, you’re in a totally different world and I don’t know why. Aren’t you happy? The Brain’s locked up.”

“Yeah. It’s locked up.”

“And you should be happy about that.”

“I should be.” He agreed. Jaime didn’t offer up anything else. He would, Bart knew, just wait for the speedster to start spurting his problem everywhere instead of trying to actively pry it out of him. It was understated, sneaky, conniving, and it almost never failed to work on someone who didn’t have the patience to wait for water to boil. “I… It’s just- I shouldn’t, but, but that’s _it_?!”

“What’s it?” He was being steered, Bart recognised. Waking up a little and taking control of his own limbs, he sat down on the couch. Jaime sat beside him, steady and calm in the face of Bart’s jitters.

“That! It! Everything! Time travel and Santa Prisca and Vandal Savage, having to explain to every fucking soul in the Watchtower about my past, and that’s IT?! That’s how it ends, with Wolf hearing something and the Brain being pathetically not insulting and just LETTING himself be taken away?! THAT’S IT?!” No, shouting was bad. Bart hauled his screech back down into an inside voice. “It can’t be.”

“You think something else is going to happen.” Jaime didn’t just hit the target; he shot right through the bullseye.

“It has to.” Bart said helplessly. “Our lives don’t do this. My life doesn’t do this. We don’t just catch people and haul them in, nothing works out that well, the villain areneverthat wellbehaved, it _doesn’t work like that_. It never has, and now something else is going to happen, because nothing cleans up this nicely, not ever.”

The first gentle touch, a hand on his arm hesitant and light. When he leaned into it, it gained strength, and Jaime pulled him closer to collapse against his side as the armour folded itself away. “It’s not common. It does happen, but it’s not common.”

“I know.” Bart muttered with the speech he’d just come up with still drying on his tongue. He tried again, attempting to make sense. “I mean, I know… I know that if you look at the statistics, it’d probably say we wrap things up cleaner than this all the bloody time. Logically, as a fact, as numbers it makes sense, but that isn’t, it isn’t- isn’t enough.

“I want to run, and never stop. I can’t stand anything touching my neck. I scream at the wrong people, and I debate with the ones who I should be shouting at. I can’t sleep. I, me, a speedster, a bottomless pit of a stomach, I forget to eat. For hours. Which is why I can’t sleep. I joke about my past with my friends, but I can’t even get enough courage to look my guardians in the eye, not because of my past, but because I’m gay. I make no sense, Jaime.”

Something reached up and started petting his hair, moving it out from the tightly pressed shape it had sunk into from being compressed under his costume. A strand of it hit his eyelids, and Bart realised the eyes underneath had shuttered themselves off from the world.

“I want to make the people who would hurt my family bleed. I did make Savage bleed. I threatened his life and I meant it, and that scares me. The Watchtower scares me. If they lock me there, if they take away my authorisation for the Zeta-tubes while I’m up there, I can’t run. I left my sketchpad up there in the room they gave me. I want it back.” He took a deep fortifying breath, and huffed it back out against the fabric of Jaime’s shirt. “I’ve got instincts. They were useful in the ash. They don’t belong here, but I don’t know if I can turn them off. They don’t listen to anything. I’m sincerely, seriously worried that the Justice League will try to make a time machine.”

“Bart. No one expects you to be perfect.”

“No, they all think I’m broken beyond repair. That’s almost worse.”

“The League does.” The scratches fingers in his hair felt nice. Relaxing. “Really that’s not even right. Some of the League does. A few people. Less than before. And you have the Team on your side, Bart. We’ll back you up.”

“I know. I know that, but… you might need to keep telling me it.”

“I’ll set it as your ringtone.”

“No stealing my new phone.” Bart sniped half-heartedly.

The hand untangling his hair didn’t stop. “We were watching the end of the movie, weren’t we? You want me to turn it back on?”

 “Sure.”

Bart was jostled a little bit when Jaime reached forward to grab the remote, but all was forgiven when he leaned back again, returning warmth to lie against and switching the television back on. The heroes of the story started talking again mid-sentence, and Bart scrambled to remember the supposedly world endingly important quest they were on, and why one of them was blue. Not that being blue was bad, but that had been important to the plot somehow.

Jaime was warm, and at some point the blankets Bart had been sleeping under had migrated up over Bart’s lap and from then defied gravity to drape themselves over his shoulders. He wasn’t calm. He wasn’t all that reassured, despite both Jaime being very reassuring and knowing that there was nothing to be worried about. But somehow, as Jaime returned to stroking his hair and someone on screen said something incredibly cheesy to their love interest and something else blew up, he fell asleep.


	16. Part 15

A tinny, repetitive series of beeps drew Bart up from his sleep. Slowly his brain booted up, telling him that he was pressed next to something, entangled in wrappings that tangled back, familiar scent and heat and security. The warm thing was breathing. That was odd, but not odd enough to make him want to move from his comfortable hollow.

The beeping wasn’t going away. Bart groaned, and opened his eyes, staring at the couch cushions in front of his face. Two pieces of input added up to spark a neuron and inform him that the beeping was a phone that was ringing, and that the ringing consequently wouldn’t stop until someone answered said phone, which wasn’t ideal, because warmth and comfort and blanket and resting his head on someone’s arm.

That was not usual. It was in-usual. There was something wrong with that sentence. Unusual. That was the right adjective. Yes.

Wrenching his thoughts back on track, Bart blinked again, using the light to coax his brain into sliding back toward the normal groove of catching, snagging, hooking thoughts. If it was light, it was morning. If it was morning -and the phone was still ringing, he didn’t have time to think about light and darkness and what time of the morning it was.

Finally beginning to move was less than a gradual adjustment. Bart went from blinking tiredly at sofa cushions to standing up with his hand on the phone in the next room in less than a second, running a hand through his hair all scruffy and tufted as he lifted up the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

“Jaime, this is Jay. Have you s- Wait. Bart?!”

He swore in the privacy of his head. “…Yeah?”

“You’re with Jaime? That’s where you’ve been?!” Jay’s voice was hurried and tense.

“Where else would I be?” He asked stiffly, standing up straight even though that action had no purpose without an audience.

“Here! Home!”

“…Home?”

“We haven’t seen you in days! Every time we glimpse you, you run. Every time we hear about you, it’s about how you left someplace.” A deep breath, distorted by the phone. “Come home, Bart. Please.”

“I shouldn’t. The League of Shadows-“

“Joan and I were cleared to come back into the house without looking over our shoulders for bloody assassins all the time, but you weren’t here. We thought you might come in the night but you didn’t.”

“I can’t.”

There was a long pause, the sound of crackly mutterings on the other end of the line keeping Bart company. Jay must have been talking with his wife. A squabble sounded, and the phone changed hands. “Young man.” Joan commanded imperiously. “Come home and talk to us.”

“I’d really rather-“

“I know perfectly well that you don’t want to.” She said forcefully. “That is of no consequence. Bart Allen, you will come _home_ , and you will do it now, is that clear?!”

“I should wait for Jaime to wake up.”

“He’s a nice boy. He won’t mind if you leave him in his bed.”

It was at that point that Bart realised Jaime couldn’t have made it to his bed the previous night, not if that thing that had been lying all tangled up with him on the couch breathed. He dropped his head, blushing, and Joan took his silence as a weakness to strike at.

“We saw your wall.” She murmured softly, a far more dangerous tone to make Bart feel hollow and stupid. “It’s like you think you’ll never be allowed back in the house again. All those notes, Bart, it’s like you were trying to tell a story with them because you wouldn’t be there to tell us in person. We all thought you’d been sleeping here after you refused to go back to the Watchtower, me, Barry, Iris, Jay, even Artemis, and then we finally got to come home last night and you… you weren’t here.”

“The League of Shadows could have been watching the place.” Bart rattled off. “You don’t want me there. It isn’t exactly an airtight secret where we live; if I brought it to the Light’s attention they could put you all on mode.”

“Excuses. Shut up, you idiot boy, and come back to us. The laundry needs putting out, and I want a helper on my epic quest.”

He smiled involuntarily. “Love you too, Joan, but no. I shouldn’t.”

“It was worth a shot at merely convincing you.”

“Maybe.”

“Good thing I do a better job of distracting you.” He could hear the smile in her voice.

Bart frowned. “Wait, what?!”

The phone was snatched out of his hand.

Jay held it up to his ear, talking to his wife. “Yes darling. Yes, I’ll tell him. We’re coming now then.”

“How’d you-“ He glared at the phone. “Joan is far too devious for a woman nearly a hundred.”

“Yes.” Jay sounded proud. “Yes she is.”

“You ran here?”

“I’m an old dog, boy, but I’m not that slow.” He snorted, affronted. “Why is your host asleep on the sofa? I thought I taught you better than that, you don’t let a host give up his bed for you.”

“Late night. Villain searching out on the ocean. Movie watching. That sort of thing.” Bart crossed his arms.

“What’s going on?” A groan from the living room indicated that maybe Jaime wasn’t as asleep as both speedsters had assumed. Bedraggled and with hooded, sleepy eyes, Jaime stuck his head into the kitchen. “Jay? What are you doing here? And Bart, why do you have your boots on?”

Bart glanced down idly, peering at his feet. “Must have forgotten to take them off last night?” He decided.

“You’ll have gotten Jaime’s furniture dirty.” Jay reproached him.

“Don’t care.” Jaime mumbled, wandering past and stripping off his shirt.

Bart furiously denied the inducement to stare. Jaime spent half his life without his shirt. Just because they had a _whatever_ to work out between them didn’t mean that- although staring might actually be encouraged now- no, definitely not. No. He turned his back and leant his head against the door of the microwave, staring inside that instead of at Jaime. When the bathroom door shut and he was sure his friend wouldn’t hear him, a groan slipped out.

“Bart?”

“M’ fine.” Besieged on two fronts and with a less awkward explanation looking to be the better of his two choices, he faced Jay again, ready to get the hell out of dodge before Jaime could notice where they’d both spent the night. “Let’s go.”

They ran to Central City slowly. Slowly for Bart, but a pace just under brisk for Jay, who told him that he’d Zetaed from Central City to the closest tube to Jaime’s apartment, but that he didn’t mind running back. However they quickly found that Jay was neither fit enough nor young enough to do that much travelling. The next city both speedsters stopped and sniffed out its Zeta tube. Bart offered to run ahead anyway. Jay caught his collar and dragged him through.

“Hey.” He complained weakly as the world resolved into Central City.

“Not letting you out of my sight. Can you blame me?”

“Not really. I can out run you.”

Jay snorted. “You were able to outrun me when you were thirteen. If you ever get slower than me I’ll know something’s seriously wrong.”

“Or that I’m pandering to your ego.”

“That too.” He tugged on Bart’s elbow. “Come on. Home isn’t far.”

“I can run all day; you’re the puffing one.” Bart retorted, but the way Jay said ‘home’, like it belonged to both of them, like it was assured and certain, that made his tone more squidgy and malleable than he’d been aiming for.

The house’s front door was locked. Bolted metal and chain, a series of little gears interlocking to bind two pieces of wood together, a mechanism both intricate and long used, and a key that was simply shaped metal providing security. Security against the mortal, against the normal and the flesh and blood that played little part in Bart’s life. A lock was no security at all. Just a placebo, a comfort blanket to snuggle up in when the monsters under the bed bared their fangs. It was less than reassuring.

“The Bat or someone has improved security, right?”

“Eh?” Jay wrinkled up his nose. “Say that again. Slower.”

Bart repeated his question.

“No? What, you think we’re going to go live in a bunker? We’ve got to have a life beyond being scared of the next damn thing to knock on the door.”

It was true, but on the other hand, living to hate a life in a bunker would be better than dying on the side of a road or in, for example, a house. Living wasn’t something you could give up, take back, or play around with. It was a light switch, either on or off. A switch which controls weren’t only given to the person whose life it was, but to every other being who ever interacted with them. Anyone could flip that switch, anyone at all, and if they did it wouldn’t affect them, not badly, not really.

He was swerving into poetic metaphors about light switches. Time to shut up his spurting mind before it could push anything towards his mouth. Bart considered phasing his way inside, but Jay was already slowed back down, unlocking the door. Right. He couldn’t do complex tasks at speed, like Wally, unlike the speedsters who had replaced them in both the red and the yellow uniforms. Bart slowed himself down to join him.

Jay waited until he was through the front door to begin herding him, unsubtly prodding and pushing the younger speedster past living room and kitchen and heading upstairs. Not to the master bedroom, not to the bathroom, not to the closet that held the linen, and try as he might, Bart couldn’t find it in him to be surprised when he was poked gently towards the bedroom he thought of as his. Joan was waiting on the bed, perched cross legged and thumbing through the earliest art book, the one that was made of sketches and learning to watercolour.

“Er.” Bart shifted his weight on his feet inelegantly. “All the good ones are already up on the wall.”

“Hello, Joan. So nice to see you Joan. You look radiant on this morn, Joan.” She glanced up. “No? We’ll just go with ‘er’, won’t we? Sit down.” She patted the bedspread to her right. Bart sat. “I’m not looking for your best drawing.”

“You aren’t?”

“Don’t sound so confused. There are other reasons to look at drawings. Here.” Joan tapped the page with one fingernail. “Tell me about this one.”

“That one?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?” She gave him a look, and Bart started talking. “It’s not even finished. The proportions are all off and I didn’t bother shading it. Really, it’s pretty simple. Cassie wanted to teach us how to play soccer. Garfield was really good, Jaime kept having to stop his scarab from shooting the ball for a tactical advantage, and Captain Marvel kept arguing with Cassie about the rules.”

“And you?”

“I slowed myself down.” He admitted. “Too much of an advantage using superspeed. I did pretty good.”

“You’re smiling.”

“It was a fun day. Years ago now, but still, that was a fun day. I don’t think I’d remember it without that sketch.”

“Is that why you made them?” She gestures to the papers in the book and put up on the wall. “So you don’t forget things?”

He had a niggling piece of intuition telling him that they were no longer discussing the nice happy books of paintings anymore. “The picture of my mother.” Bart started. “I think by the time I painted it, I hadn’t seen her face in four, five years? Something like that. I can still remember it now, but in ten years, I know I won’t be able to. It isn’t like I brought back any photos with me. The one place her face still exists is in my head, so I painted it, so I wouldn’t forget it.”

Joan reached behind her back and brought out a backpack that was vaguely familiar in the way of objects he had been around for a long time without every really taking note of them. Jay stepped over to help her, unzipping the main compartment and bringing out a yellow and red bundle. Kid Flash’s costume, clean and laundered but still ripped and scrubbed raw in places. “We brought it back down from the Watchtower for you.” He said solemnly.

“I can fix the ears. The fabric,” Joan clarified, “not the electronics.”

“There was another thing of yours in that room up on the tower.” Jay put the scruffy costume to one side and fished into the backpack again, the backpack that Bart realised must have been the same one he’d loaded with clothes when he’d first darted back to the house, breaking the League’s decision to keep him penned in unknowingly.

His sketchbook, the old one, the very first one with all the not-secret-anymore things in it. Unwillingly the teenager held out his hands, silently requesting possession of it. He’d forgotten it was up there, abandoned on the Watchtower.

“You didn’t give us stories for all the pictures.” Joan said.

“Some of them aren’t that important.” Bart countered. “Besides, you’ve looked through the book after I left. You’ll have seen them all.”

“No, we haven’t. We’d never invade your privacy like that, Bart, you have to-“

“Know that? I do. I’m just a little jumpy.” He dismissed his own paranoia, waving his hand to swat it off like a fly. “You can ignore like, thirty per cent of what I say, you know that, you’ve had to live with me for ages.”

“I suppose you have reason to distrust us right now.” Jay rubbed the back of his head.

“The video of me shouting at Black Canary should be on youtube by now, yeah.” Not that they could ever really do that, security concerns, but the drama that slipped through superhero lives would be enough to keep a television network happy for years.

“You didn’t shout at her.” Jay said ruefully. “You were very calm, you made sense. You showed us how much the rest of us weren’t making sense.”

“Once every couple of thousand years I have to make sense, just to balance things out.”

“Bart.”

“Fine.” He subsided unwillingly. “I’ll be serious.”

“Good.” Jay nodded. “Barry said he’d spent yesterday helping you track down one of the Light. He said you looked okay?”

“So what you’re asking is if I’m emotionally stable.” Bart flopped backwards, stretching his arms back as he stretched lying down. “Do you want like, bland truth or a lie to make everyone including me feel better?”

“Truth.”

“I’m not actually sure. I’m genuinely not sure how I feel, and I know that isn’t reassuring, but that’s true. I don’t know. Can we move on to something else? Please? I’ve talking about nothing but how I feel and how un-traumatised I am for days and days and days. There’s got to be another topic out there that we all agree is valid.”

“Fine.” Jay sat down on Bart’s other side. If the speedster sat up, both his shoulders would have bumped into his guardians. “Why were you sequestered away at Jaime’s house? You came back here at least twice, once for the clothes you took up to the Watchtower, once to hang up all these pictures on the wall. If you didn’t see any Shadow members hanging around to assassinate us, why didn’t you just sleep in your bed? We were up on the Watchtower. Even if you didn’t want to talk to us you’d have had the place to yourself.”

“I, um, thought it might be better to stay with someone?” He offered.

“Someone who wasn’t us.” Jay questioned in a way that wasn’t questioning, more guessing the truth than estimating some vague unknown. “Not us, not Barry or Iris, not even Artemis. When we called this morning, you really weren’t that keen on coming to talk to us. You gotta tell us why.”

“No Idon’t.” Bart said on autopilot.

“Put it this way,” Joan reached back, putting a hand flat on his stomach. Bart felt it shift as he breathed, the point of contact light but grounding. “It would be a good idea to tell us why you don’t want to talk to us. Why you thought now was the time to start interior decorating, why you insist that you’re fine and why you then ran when you saw us yesterday.”

“I can tell you about more pictures.” More stories dredged up from years ago, more snippets of a different life brought into light. It wouldn’t be fun, wouldn’t even come close, but Bart could do it.

“We aren’t asking for more memories from you, Bart.” Her hand traced a circle on his belly, not enough to be ticklish. “We are asking why you’re avoiding us and how we can convince you to stop.”

“M’ not…” He wasn’t supposed to lie. Not that anyone had agreed on a rule explicitly saying so, but he’d lied too much already, hidden things that had festered and seeped through at the wrong moment. It was hard to give your trust to someone who you knew had lied, but it was downright impossible to do so when they continuing lying long after they’d been caught out. “It’s not what you think.”

“It isn’t?” Jay asked.

“No. Nothing to do with the whole paintings and stories and inhibitor collar mess, or the Light, or the League of Shadows. Something else.” Bart closed his eyes. “You might really hate me for it.”

“Did you cause damage?” Joan inquired, pressing gently with both hand and tone. “Did you hurt somebody?”

“What? No. It isn’t like that.”

“Then we could never hate you.”

Bart moved, scrubbed at his eyelids with the heels of his hands. “I just- I blurted it out in the Watchtower, but… yeah.” It was something that needed to be said. Whether or not he’d prefer to keep things the ways they were, keeping balancing between secrets and lies and the trust people gave him just wasn’t an option. Better they hear it from him than from anyone else. “I’m gay.”

He wasn’t going to check their facial expressions, their body language, the glances they might be sending to each other, a sort of long practised communication between a couple who had spent more time together than apart. He wasn’t. The hand on his stomach stopped moving. Bart waited, keeping his eyes shut and relaxed, his limbs limp, his breathing steady.

“And… you’re sure of that?” He identified Jay’s voice from behind his eyelids.

“Yes.” He replied. “Completely.”

“You’re sure without ever trying?”

“Trying what?” Bart said resigned and dull. “Tried kissing a girl? I don’t want to. I find the idea kinda gross. Tried kissing another guy? Done that.”

“…And?”

“And what? I thought it was horrible and I never did it again? Course not.” He tipped upwards in a quick movement, attempting to keep the combat-ready defensiveness out of his voice. “I liked it. I repeated the experiment in various ways. I’ve kissed a guy, dated a guy, and-“ he jerked to a halt before his mouth could mention sex, “all that, and I enjoyed it, and I don’t have any desire to do it with a girl, ever.”

“You’re dating someone?” Joan tilted her head, staring at him. “How long has this been going on?!”

“It went on for a couple months before we stopped.” He recited factually.

“And we didn’t we meet them?!” She demanded.

“Because he’s a guy, I never met his family either, and he lives in a tiny town in Mexico.”

“No.” She glared. “No, if you’d been properly serious about this young person, you’d have brought them home to meet us. You didn’t, so either it was never serious, or you thought we’d-“ Joan stopped, clarity in her expression before the glare and frown darkened considerably. “Bart _Allen_!”

“What?!” He tried to back away, but Jay was on his other side. Then again with that expression, Jay was probably backing away from his wife too.

“ _This_ is what you are so worried about?! You think we would detest you because you’re gay?”

“Er.” He said intelligently, looking for an escape route.

Too late. Jay’s hand descended, pressure keeping him in place as the older speedster added the pieces together for the obvious conclusion. “Bart.”

That was the not-angry- _disappointed_ tone. He cringed. “Yeah?”

“Bart we may be old and tired,” Jay chided him, voice rooted and steady, “and we may have grown and lived in a different time. That does not automatically make us intolerant. Despite what you seem to think, homosexuality wasn’t invented in the nineteen seventies. It’s always been there.”

“But you-“

“As long as you’re happy and what you’re doing is, um,” Jay shifted awkwardly, looking off to the side, “safe, sane, and consensual, I personally don’t object to anyone you might choose.”

“I expect to meet the next young man you step out with. And don’t give me any ‘he lives in Antarctica’ nonsense. We have Zeta tubes and we know how to work them.” It was a nice sentiment, if not an entirely truthful one. Bart could see that Joan was uncomfortable, could read it in the line of her neck and the tension in her shoulders, but she was making an effort. She was trying.

“I…” Bart lost his words, mouth working uselessly. “You are really just okay with, with this?”

“If it’s just a prank, or something you said to get out of talking about anything else, I am going to be cross.” Jay warned him. “But… The only girls you’ve brought home were your Teammates, and you pretty clearly weren’t interested in them. The other lads your age on the Team went through a phase of refusing to touch your female friends or blushing in their directions, but you’ve never done that. We used to say you might be gay because of it.”

“You knew?” It didn’t sound like they’d known. But he wasn’t sure what else to take from that statement.

“We didn’t know.” Jay shook his head. “It was just idle speculation.”

“It does make a lot of sense now.” Joan smiled slightly. “You haven’t ever panted after young girls like most of the boys your age. Did you seriously believe we would react negatively? Did you really add this to your list of secrets?”

“What list of secrets?” Bart protested. “I only had two. I’m from a worse time than you all assumed, and I like other guys. That’s it. And it was hard enough shutting up about them, I don’t _like_ lying. I know you’re good people, but, but Jay, you were born _before_ the First World War ended, and I was born twenty two, twenty three years into the future! It’s more than a century it’s… I just didn’t know what you’d think of me. Couldn’t take the chance you might hate me for it.”

Joan wrapped her arm around his waist, grabbing on to her husband on the other side. “If you didn’t feel like you could tell us, you could have talked to Barry, or Iris, or anyone really. Did you?”

“Er… Jaime knows? I guess? He found out about it by accident about a month ago.”

“And before then?” Joan continued.

Bart shrugged, and it was an answer of itself.

“Why? Why keep it a-“

“I have seen and read about people being harassed, injured and killed for their sexuality, and it is possibly the most barbaric thing I have found in this time.” He said stiffly. “Say what you like about the time I grew up in, but people didn’t kill other people based on who was sticking what where. The first time I heard about it, it terrified me. Mainly because I didn’t know why wanting to kiss other guys was so horrible, but I also couldn’t get my head around the idea that I would be in danger if I did so. A little beyond thirteen year old comprehension. So I shut up about how I thought the guys on television were more attractive than the girls, and I stayed shut up.” The formal talking thing was back in full force, his tone emotionless and unyielding. “I had no desire to ostracize myself. I understand that there have been steps taken toward social equality, but from my perspective, on this issue the future I destroyed would have been much more welcoming.”

 “Oh sweetie…” Joan pulled him in, tugging harder when Bart stayed tense and inflexible, running a hand along his spine. It had sounded like she’d had something to add to the end of that snippet of speech, but instead they stayed that way, the hand petting down his spine finding a rhythm. Slowly, under duress, Bart relaxed. It was unconscious, not on purpose, and as soon as he caught himself doing it he tensed back up, only to be eroded once more.

“We won’t stop loving you.” She whispered somewhere above his head. “We could never.”

“You telling me the apocalypse was good for equal rights?” Jay didn’t laugh, exactly. But his tone was lighter, propelling the conversation away from the sore points that littered Bart’s perception.

Bart very tactfully refrained from pointing out that the reason it had been so good at erasing homophobia and racism and the rest was that people had rather more urgent things to deal with, like feeding themselves. He was sick of talking about the depressing things. A joke was looking far more valuable to him than another question. When Jay’s hand, the one interlaced with Joan’s fingers with the ease of quiet familiarity, came to rest on one of his shoulder blades Bart hummed, a low, deep, tuneless sound made deeper by the weird vibrations of his throat until it morphed into something more like a purr than a human noise.

“Cat.” Jay said affectionately.

It was lunchtime before anyone tried to broach a topic that wasn’t light hearted or distracting; the three of them eating in the kitchen. Bart stood a little closer to both his guardians than he usually would even if the impulse to do so reminded him more of a duckling hiding behind its mother than a supposedly tough superhero. Joan had spent her time fussing over his hair, of all things. Jay had passed over a message from Batman, an obliquely phrased statement that, if Bart was interoperating it right, basically amounted to a telling off for taking stuff from the Batcave. Bart told them how the Team had taken in the Brain the previous night, a story he didn’t mind expounding on although he didn’t mention anything about accusing the League of betraying their ideals to get their hands on time travel. Sure, that accusation had only been in his head, but it had been there nonetheless.

Finally dishes were rinsed in the sink, tucked away into the dishwasher, and talk that didn’t poke at a vulnerable spot run out. Jay shifted uncertainly. “Bart?”

“Yeah?” He tried to not let himself slip into a sharper tone. There weren’t any more secrets to protect.

“Will you come home?”

The world slowed down. It was a useful gift to have, the ability to speed up his reflexes and thought until they were blindingly bright. Superspeed didn’t only affect how fast he could move. It gave him time to think, to properly consider both whether he should and whether he wanted to. From the outside, there was only a slight, barely noticeable pause before he answered. “I will.”

“Don’t sound like we’re sending you to your death.” Joan grouched, digging through the cupboard for tea.

Bart examined the two packets of teabag’s she’d already put out on the bench. “You do realise this stuff’s all just leaves, right?”

“Wrong!” She called back fiercely.

Bart rolled his eyes, only able to do so because he was assured that he was out of her field of vision and that Jay found her love of different blends of leaves equally puzzling. As predicted, the older speedster didn’t say anything, tilting his head in silent agreement and setting the kettle to boil ready for whatever caffeinated drink Joan eventually decided upon.

“I’ll go get my stuff.” Bart said it like a peace offering, or would have if he’d ever actually seen a peace offering that wasn’t a metaphor for something else, usually a knife ready to stab once the eye was turned away. “Better tell Jaime I won’t be sleeping on his couch too.”

“Invite him over for dinner.” Joan tossed out carelessly as she started to emerge from the depths of a pantry made to accommodate all the food for not just one but two speedsters.

If he needed confirmation that his guardians had no idea about the whole _thing_ (he didn’t have any better word) between him and Jaime, that was it. There was no way they’d suggest that if they were aware, or even slightly suspicious about any of the whole mess that he really had to think about at some near point in the future. With the Light beaten back and the Brain locked up and Black Canary kept away from him with a ten foot pole, with Jay and Joan informed about the _every_ part of _everything_ , and most importantly, not sleeping in Jaime’s living room, Bart had to make a decision.

It wasn’t like he had to date Jaime or kiss him or whatever. If nothing else, camping out in his house for a few days had shown that they were both capable of tactfully ignoring each other. Or not ignoring each other, because the banter that had clicked back into place between them was both welcoming and distracting enough to comfort, but at the very least, they’d been functioning platonically despite knowing they were both crushing on each other.

So they could still work, as friends rather than the other one. It was a conclusion that both felt like what Bart thought a complex piece of mathematics looked like to other people and eased tension off his shoulders as he ran the route between Central City and Jaime’s apartment. It meant that he didn’t have to give Jaime one type of answer just to keep him around. If anything had been proven by the at times awkward (he was so very glad Jaime hadn’t woken up when they were on the couch) stay on that sofa, a stay he wouldn’t have chosen just then had it not been for certain things like fucking amateur therapists trying to lock him on space stations, it was that with the big secret out in the open Jaime could still treat him like the best friends they’d been for years.

It had probably helped that Bart had stopped crawling into his lap.

It was funny. Well not _funny_ -funny, Bart thought ruefully, but it showed how wrapped up in himself he’d been lately. People had been telling him that Jaime was looking at him strangely for weeks. He’d been so tense, spooked like a skittish horse, because Jaime had gotten one of two secrets out of him and he’d accidentally revealed that he was hiding even more, and the whole thing had been unravelling, another thread exposed, too much practise with lying, so much that telling the truth on those subjects worried him more. So Bart had jumped to the ‘he hates me’ corner, because that was what this time was like except for when it wasn’t.

A time traveller who had escaped the legions of occupiers in the future, who had made Vandal Savage bleed and the Justice League wary, and he hadn’t recognised someone crushing on him. Bart snorted to himself, not that the sound made it anywhere near his ears before it was lost to the winds. A genius who couldn’t cook and who kicked people off roofs when they kissed him. Bit of a contradiction there.

He hadn’t been expecting Jaime to be in his apartment when Bart let himself in, blurring through the door. Locking away any lines of thought that may-or-may-not have been connected to his host, he grinned. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Jaime was reading something, a book big and thick and boring-looking even if Bart had been taught to not judge them by their covers.

“Hay is for horses.”

His friend turned his head up from the doubtlessly fascinating read. “Bart, that doesn’t work if you’ve already said ‘hey’.”

“Yes it does.”

“No it doesn’t.”

“Does.”

“Doesn’t, the scarab agrees with me.”

“Damn it,” he fell against the wall, smirking, “I’ve been outvoted, huh?”

“You’re all smiles suddenly, aren’t you?” The book was closed. Good. Bart was far more interesting than little sheets of paper. “They were fine with it, weren’t they?”

“Don’t sound so smug, it was perfectly reasonable to worry.”

“No it wasn’t.” Jaime smiled, the soft twist of lips and stubble that hadn’t disappeared for the day yet managing to divert Bart from taking up the argument. Bart was just cataloguing changes in his friend’s demeanour. Of course he was. “Your family might not have anyone else in it that’s gay, but they’re really tolerant. After all, Jay and Joan were always completely in support of Wally and Artemis.”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but they were a hetero couple.” It wasn’t a question, but what Jaime was saying made no sense.

“Artemis is half Vietnamese.”

“So?”

“She’s half Vietnamese,” Jaime said slowly, “and she looks it. Her skin isn’t white.”

“Jaime, you still aren’t making sense.” But something about the way his Teammate was talking made his stomach sink.

“Inter-racial couples were banned in quite a few countries in the world. In the United States a ruling by the Supreme Court in nineteen sixty seven legalised them, but they weren’t exactly common or encouraged.” Was this what they taught in schools? Bart didn’t know, and he had enough sense to grasp that asking would be rude. “By then Jay and Joan would have been in their mid-forties. That’s when it was legalised. And then there was the Vietnam War, and don’t tell me that wouldn’t have affected what they thought of the Vietnamese, so Artemis wasn’t white, and her mother was from a place that Jay and Joan have to remember being at war with.

“Wally dated Artemis, and they met her and welcomed her and treated her like anyone else, even if what your family must have once been taught would have been very against that.” Jaime was finishing, running out of steam as Bart gaped. “If they’ve adapted before they can do it again. I told you that you didn’t have to worry.”

The speedster drew himself up from where he’d been flopped against the wall, jaw locked tight. One of his fists clenched.

Jaime saw it. Of course he did. “Bart?”

“Are, are…” His voice was too quiet. He tried again. “Are you all _savages_?! Them- the-“ He lost coherency. Bart descended into a hiss of air and implied expletives.

“Bart?!” Jaime put a hand on his shoulder. Bart wasn’t sure when he’d gotten up but he was grateful for the support. “What’s wrong?”

Jaime didn’t even know what was wrong. As quickly as the angry horror had arrived it deflated. Bart reached up a hand to run it through his hair. “Time traveller issues.”

“What? Can you tell me? You don’t have to.”

Jaime asked whether he could and whether he wanted to, rather than if he would. “The idea that skin colour should decide how you are treated in a court of _Justice_ … I don’t… Rascism is supposed to be gone by this point in the timeline! Isn’t it?”

“You’re very innocent, cariño.” Jaime blinked, like he was a little surprised at what was coming out of his mouth, and his hand left the speedster’s shoulder. Bart had long experience with a brain to mouth filter that only worked sporadically and could recognise the signs. “No, I’m not saying Wally and Artemis were strange for getting together. I’m pointing out that Jay and Joan don’t see the world through the traditional values they might have been taught when they were growing up. I’m not surprised that it wasn’t the big disaster you expected it to be.”

“I am.” He said bluntly.

“So I gather.” Jaime raised his eyebrow.

“You’re nowhere near as scary as the ninja butler when you do that.”

“I don’t think there is a ninja butler.” Jaime retorted smoothly. “I think you just made him up as a code with the Batfamily.”

“He gave me cookies.”

“The supermarket also provides you with cookies, doesn’t make it sentient.”

“He let me into the Batcave?”

“Or you ran through the door.”

“He found a fire extinguisher when I shot the floor.”

“Shooting things doesn’t set them on fire, it embeds bullets in things.”

“Depends on the gun.” Bart smirked.

“I don’t want to know.” Amused and resigned, Jaime waved a hand at the backpack Bart was still keeping in a corner. “You getting your stuff back?”

Abruptly the speedster was reminded that there was an actual reason to come to the apartment other than banter. “…Right. I’m getting out of your hair. Why do we having that saying? Surely you can’t really get into someone’s _hair_.”

Bart’s quip got a smile but not much else. “It’s been good having you here.”

“I’ve eaten your food, failed at cooking, dragged you hundreds of miles to search for a supervillain at midnight, and stopped you sleeping afterwards.” Bart disagreed. “I don’t think I’ve been the ideal houseguest dude.”

“Still. It’s been good having you here.” His friend moved past him in the kitchen. “I’ll get your weird phone, if it hasn’t broken yet.”

“Won’t break.” Bart mumbled under his breath, but blurred into action anyway.

He’d come with a backpack full of stuff, so there weren’t massive amounts of things to put away. By the time Jaime came back with Bart’s new phone and its charger the backpack was only missing those two items and Kid Flash had taken the blanket that had been slumped over the sofa for the previous three nights and put it back where it had been fished out from, folded and neat. The couch which he’d slept on looked the same as it ever did, the same as a month ago, the same as a month before that. All tidied like he’d never disturbed it.

Jaime handed over his phone and Bart tucked it away. The simple action seemed to signify something, because when he straightened Jaime was gone, opening the front door to let him out. Bart nodded to him in thanks. “You have my new number, right?”

“Got it.”

Kid Flash shifted awkwardly. “Okay then. Thanks?”

“No trouble. Really. Say hi to Jay and Joan for me?”

“Sure.”

The door shut. Bart would have thought of it as an embarrassing goodbye with all the elegance of Superboy in the middle of a brawl, but he’d gotten a new scale for such things. It wasn’t so bad.

When he’d returned his clothes back to the drawers in his own bedroom Bart paused, reconsidered, and threw the entire load in the washing machine. There had to have been some dirty clothes in there somewhere. He switched the machine on. There was a basket of damp clean clothes waiting to be put out. Usually Bart would have had Joan helping him, resolutely protesting that his assistance was unnecessary and he was doing more harm than good, but he didn’t have the patience for that dance. It took thirty seconds to hang everything up.

He wasn’t made to stay still. Snap decisions weren’t only the most common way Bart decided things, they were his preferred method. Given too much time to think about it every plan had holes. He could never cover for every redundancy, but spending great heaps of time thinking about it made them all glaringly obvious. In other words he over thought things and panicked. But he’d chosen this, Bart reminded himself. He’d chosen to not make a snap decision; to put it all aside for a later time. Jaime had respected that and not tried to sway him. The least Kid Flash could do was give him an honest answer.

He dropped the basket and the pouch of pegs on the ground, leaving them by the stem of the washing line as he paced away slowly, brushing a hanging fold of cloth out of his way. The corner of the garden wasn’t beautiful, or even very well looked after. Joan had loved it, once. Now she stuck to the raised basins of dirt brought up to sit on benches higher where she didn’t have to strain her back and Bart occasionally attacked the weeds. He’d never enjoyed gardening. It required patience from start to finish, and most of the time he couldn’t eat what came out of it. Joan had let it slide; smoothing out the furrows in her forehead and telling him not to worry about it, so the neatly mowed lawn ended and a flowerbed of knee high weeds buffered the space between clipped grass and wooden fence. Bart grumbled to himself, inarticulately expressing that he didn’t need to add garden-guilt to the list of things to examine. He flopped down on the patch of ground and scowled at the wall.

Having a crush on someone wasn’t the same as thinking they were attractive. Jaime was attractive. Nightwing was attractive. Red Robin was attractive; the whole damn Team was attractive, because superheroes were just like that for some reason. Objectively Bart could even see that the girls, Cassie and Karen and Batgirl, they were all attractive, if not to him specifically. Noting that someone was attractive and then disregarding that for, say, the opportunity to work with them, that was very different to a crush. He defined a crush, or he was trying to, as noting someone was attractive in a more-than-aesthetic sense and wanting to date them or spend time with them, less of an objective appreciation and more of a feeling with added romantic mixings.

By those parameters, and Bart winced when he realised how cold the scientific language sounded in his head, he did have a crush on Jaime. It wasn’t just that his friend was attractive and that with Jaime’s view on things cleared up a bit it was more okay to think that about him than his other, still presumably straight Teammates. Jaime was kind, and self-sacrificing, and too well meaning for his own good. Clueless about some things, but startlingly wise about others. He’d had Bart sleeping on his couch, ready and available for questioning, and he hadn’t asked anything.

His biggest worry was what would change. If they’d still banter and joke and have fun, or if they’d be embarrassed. If it didn’t work out and ruined their friendship, because Nightwing was still friends with everyone he’d dated, but Miss Martian and La’gann still weren’t that close, even if they’d protect each other in a fight. Bart didn’t want Jaime to just have his back in a brawl; he didn’t want to lose his best friend. He wanted everything they had already, all the banter and quips, the absentminded support, the serious advice and the playful games and the closeness they’d only just tentatively begun to get back, everything. And if he wanted to kiss Jaime on top of that? If he wanted touch and closeness that wasn’t platonic, as unknown as that territory stood, was that possible?

Just like they were, with more kissing. Bart poked at the idea and found it full of flaws and weaknesses, but every other plan had them too. If he turned Jaime down and stayed friends, they might not stay friends, or they might but it would be awkward, or it might work perfectly and he’d be left with a reciprocated crush that couldn’t go anywhere. He’d already established that saying nothing and ignoring it until the problem went away wouldn’t be fair.

“Bart?”

He looked up, shading his eyes with one hand. “What’s up?”

“I saw the basket lying outside.” Joan gestured to the carrier poised on her hip and the pouch slung over her shoulders. “I told you I needed help, not that you had to do it yourself.”

“Needed something to do with my hands.”

“You often do.” Joan nodded, accepting. “Jay called your grandfather. Just so he wouldn’t worry about where you were. Is that okay?”

“Fine. They still up on the Watchtower?”

“No, they were cleared to come down the same time we were. Or Iris was, I think Barry was needed in China round about then.” Bart stood up and let Joan lead the way back indoors. “But you shouldn’t let me natter on, Jay got passed a message for you.”

“What about?” He lifted the basket out of her hands to put it back in its place.

“The League wants you back on the Watchtower. Barry told them you wouldn’t come, but he was told it wasn’t about your book of paintings or your mental health.” Joan headed toward the kitchen, Bart shadowing her. “They need to formally debrief you, or that’s what they say. Since you were on that island with the League, because you ended up in their mission, you can’t be debriefed by the Team Leader.”

Back up to the Watchtower. Bart stayed silent.

“Barry says it’s a good idea, because you turning up on their mission didn’t go down so well. Explaining yourself couldn’t hurt.” Joan starting pulling out pots and measuring cups like they were talking about something light and easy and casual. Bart appreciated the pretence. “But he also said that if you don’t want to go, or if you want to leave the Watchtower at any point, he’ll make sure you can go.”

“He’s giving me a guarantee I won’t be locked up there?” Bart ran a hand along the edge of the kitchen counter.

“Yes. And Jay and I are your legal guardians. They can’t keep you there and we won’t let them. It was a mistake to make the first time. We are supposed to learn from those things.” Her jaw was set, quiet determination in her words. “You don’t have to.”

“…I will.”

“You will?” She straightened up.

Bart nodded. “I have to go back up there eventually,” he reasoned, “might as well be under a promise not to keep me there. It’s not that bad, I just really didn’t like having my choices taken off me. I know that it looked like the best thing for me at the time.”

Lines he hadn’t noticed draw up relaxed, leaving Joan with an expression of relief. “The meeting’s tomorrow.” She offered. “We can come up with you, if you like?”

Bart considered protesting having a bodyguard made up of people over or nearly a hundred, but didn’t comment. It was well meant, and it couldn’t hurt. “Sure. We can grab lunch there.”

The conversation died sometime after, with Joan picking out her recipe book and Bart excusing himself. They were going to debrief him on Santa Prisca. They’d already watched the security footage of him explaining his sordid past; they must have. There was no reason to ask him more questions about that. He would be able to leave if he wanted to, it would be different. He’d have his guardians and his grandfather and other allies on his side. The Watchtower was the Team’s base and he couldn’t be uncomfortable there forever. This was good. It would be easy. It was good.


	17. Part 16

“No.”

“Bart, we’re headed to the Justice League’s base.” Jay repeated. “Take a second to put on your costume, huh?”

“Nup.” He shrugged and got into the car. Joan, situated up in front of him in the passenger seat, stayed silent with a smile threatening at the edges of her mouth as her husband bickered with the teenager in the back. “They aren’t going to be sending me on any missions or nothing, I’m getting debriefed. Noneed forthe costume.”

Jay sighed and flicked the ignition on, backing out of the garage. “I still think yellow and red would be better than civilian clothes.”

“You’ve started driving, I win.” Bart chirped. Before anyone could contest that, or stop the car, he continued. “Look, I’ve been wearing the suit way too much lately, I’m sick of it. It’s not like they all don’t know my secret identity.”

“They might not-“

“You’re going to be coming with me. It’s a very subtle play to make them think I live in Gotham, is it? No, they know who I am. Unless we’re on a mission most people call me Bart anyway.”

The debate didn’t stop, exactly, but it was clear that Jay knew he was on the losing side when they pulled into a car park. A unisex bathroom off to the side hung with an obvious out of order sign marked the Zeta tube, and Bart kept pace with his guardians as they made their slow way to it. The computer recognised them, with the updated status that had been bestowed on Jay and Joan still applying, and whisked them all away.

The main room of the Watchtower was almost never empty. Used for meetings and planning missions and keeping track of members out in the field, it was an odd day when the League or the Team didn’t have someone there doing something. There were better rooms for each individual function, but in a space station with too much space and not enough members to fill it those rooms often went unused in favour of congregating in the central chamber.

Bart had anticipated in a vague, unsounded sort of a way that the debriefing would happen where the original explanation had been torn out of him. To see the room standing vacant except for Batgirl holding up three screens in the centre and talking rapidly into her communicator was unexpected. Hopping down off the raised platform the Zeta tubes made and trusting Joan and Jay to take care of themselves, he approached the more senior member of the Team.

She was scrolling through two windows of information, while her third showed a live feed from the squad she must have been helping. Bart waiting politely, if not patiently, for her to finish. “Yes?” Batgirl didn’t look up, so gods know how she knew he was there.

“Do you know where I’m supposed to be?” He asked without preamble, aware of how quickly Batgirl could be needed again by his Teammates out in the field.

“Third floor, room four A.” Batgirl answered. She smiled, but had to turn back to what she was doing an instant later. “No, Wonder Girl, its authorization four-one-four-nine-eight-smoke-three, you need to-“

Bart nodded his thanks and left her to it. Darting to the other end of the room, he called up an elevator and zipped inside, button held down to keep the doors open as his elderly companions caught up to him. Running the stairs would be quicker, but even if Jay and Joan had spent a little vacation up on the Watchtower as the League established no one was going to hurt them, they likely wouldn’t know where everything was. The elevator took them down to the third floor, and Bart restrained himself from tapping or fidgeting.

Everything looked the same from one level to another if no one put in the effort to customize anything. The Watchtower was made of mostly prefabricated parts brought up into space, so it made sense, but it never got any less disorientating when a door leading to a science laboratory or a gym actually opened up to reveal a janitorial closet. The teenager found the label saying four A in neat block letters and stepped forward into the sensor, making the door swish open.

It was a conference room. Which made sense given the circumstances, but Bart wasn’t used to anything in his life making sense. The walls were the same bland grey as the hallways outside, the ceiling low enough that the bend of Hawkman’s wings brushed along it and no one would be flying. Justice League members stood around the three tables, talking and debating and laying claim to seats. The three new arrivals went unnoticed, and Bart was perfectly happy to keep it that way. He spotted the Flash talking to Plastic Man over to one side and decided that staying near his mentor couldn’t hurt.

Plastic Man bulged in a blatantly impossible extension when he caught sight of Bart, twisting past the Flash to point an accusing finger at the teenager. “Who are you? How’d you get in here, security failure, someone call-”

Bart rolled his eyes. The Flash pulled in Plastic Man by his stretching neck. “Calm down.” The mature speedster said. “You’re making a scene.”

“B-but security breach! Who is he?!”

Bart waved a hand. It made a small crack as it briefly met up with the sound barrier. “Really?”

“Oh.” Plastic Man deflated.

“Yeah, oh.” One of the Green Lanterns must have been watching. He looked over at his colleague. “You don’t think a kid might have to be a super genius to authorize himself for the Zeta tubes? And the costume’s not exactly that great at concealing him in the first place. Although,” he turned to Bart, “I don’t know why you aren’t wearing it.”

“He’s right, why are you in civilian clothes Bart?” The Flash pulled out a chair for Joan, which she accepted with a gracious smile.

“I assumed I wasn’t exactly going to be sent into combat.” Bart found his own chair, as various superheroes all around the room started to take their seats. “I’m here to tell you guys my perspective on Santa Prisca, not go on a mission, and I’m sick of wearing the suit.”

“I guess you have been stuck in it for a while.” His grandfather agreed.

“Attention. Attention!” Captain Atom took temporary charge of the room. “If everyone could take a chair, we’ve got to start. First some administrative issues, then a short description of what went on in everyone’s fights, then Kid Flash can take the floor. If that’s alright with you?”

“Sure.” Bart shrugged.

It took less than five minutes for his perfect posture to fade away and for Kid Flash to slump in his seat. He started supporting his head’s weight with his arm as a discussion started to rage over who controlled Santa Prisca, both legally and physically. Then they moved on to the technology taken off the island, and Bart perked up, only to sink back down into boredom when all anyone wanted to talk about was what to do with the island load of broken machines, most of which couldn’t have ever been used for the research Bart set off the EMP to contain. The only useful thing he gleaned from that was that no one had been able to get anything to start working again.

When they finally moved on to stories of the fight itself the subject of conversation got more interesting by a tiny increment before Bart realised that he was going to have to listen to what was basically the same story over and over again. Red Tornado gave a short recount of what it had been like in the Watchtower while the League was deployed, which was marginally more exciting, but then Green Arrow started up with another story of the fight and the cycle continued.

He was resting with his forehead dropped on the surface of the table when someone said his name. Bart jolted upright, displacing a little current of air with his movement as a faint titter sounded. Black Canary, unfortunately situated in a position to make eye contact with him, cleared her throat. The giggles died off. “Do you… need some time?” She asked gently.

Bart blinked and said the first thing that came to mind. “No, you’re alljust really boring.”

The laughter was more pronounced that time. Superman waited until it had stopped, grinning indulgently. “Well then, if you’ll pardon my levity, will you entertain us with something a bit less dull?”

Bart relaxed slightly. “No problem, dude. What do you want to know?”

“Start with what you think is relevant, and go from there.”

“Okay.” The kyrptonian’s suggestion was a good one. “But, um, before I do, there’s certain things I won’t tell you. That’s pretty much the time machine and how to make one; I’m not giving out guides on how to do that.”

“I accept that parameter,” Red Tornado said, “but I would enquire why you place those restrictions.”

“Kid Flash didn’t trust Vandal Savage or the Light with a time machine, and for good damn reasons.” Batman said factually. “Even if he lied to them and gave them false information, he still made sure to destroy all the data on Santa Prisca to try to stop them from trying again. He doesn’t trust Savage with a time machine. He doesn’t trust us with one either.”

“Now, hold on,” Jay spoke up.

“No.” Bart said over the top of his guardian. He appreciated the support, but Batman had hit the centre of the proverbial target. The detective was right. “I don’t trust you. Please don’t take it personally; I wouldn’t trust _anyone_ with a time machine. Not Savage, not you, not the Green Lantern’s bosses from their planet. I wouldn’t trust me with a time machine, but I’m the one that made it, so we’re all stuck with me in on the secret.”

“You really made it yourself?” Green Arrow was sitting next to Black Canary, who was still looking at Kid Flash like he was a bomb that threatened explosion.

“I did.” Bart confirmed to the archer. “The electromagnetic pulse was my fault too. On the subject of that,” he turned to Batman, “I need to apologise to the person who I can’t name about the whole stealing from the Batcave incident.”

The Batman inclined his head. “He wasn’t upset. But let me make this clear, I don’t want you taking from my cave Kid Flash.”

“I needed familiar technology.” Bart explained, careful not to make any promises. “If there had been another stockpile of Reach tech that was easier to get to, I would’ve taken it from there instead.”

 “Don’t make a habit of it.”

“I’ll try not to mode you.” He agreed.

“So the EMP was made from offworld materials?” The Atom jumped into the conversation with a light in his eyes that spoke of science and taking things apart, dissection and discovery and the excitement of new things. “Was that the reason the core was cold?”

“Why do we debate temperature?!” Wonder Woman gestured, commanding the room’s attention in a way that made it very clear that she’d been raised as royalty. “That is not important.”

“It’s actually pretty interesting from a scientific point of view, but I guess that stuff can wait.” Bart let it go. “You want the first thing I think is relevant? Alright.”

He began with the night he was taken, a description of the trailer park and the fight in it, the assassins of the League of Shadows and Deathstroke waiting to pounce. The days spent in captivity only needed a few sentences to sum up. Nothing much had happened after Savage had found the weak spot with which to apply leverage, although Icon commented that Bart’s rapid and panicked evacuation of his family made more sense with backstory.

He was interrupted for the first time while he was in the middle of describing how he’d stolen the tools he so dearly needed from the Brain. “Hold on.” Bart dutifully stopped as Batman reached down and brought up something from under the table, a clear plastic ziplock bag of the sort used for forensic evidence. “Is this really all you needed to deactivate an inhibitor collar?”

Bart looked at the items being spread out over the table. There was the inhibitor collar itself, still just a dead circlet of metal with the inlaid lights off, but there were also the shards of metal and spring and plastic he’d used to escape from it. “I was expecting you to keep the collar,” he murmured, interested, “but where’d you get the other stuff?”

“We took them from the compartments in your damaged costume.” There was absolutely no chagrin in Batman’s voice or expression, but beside him the Atom ducked his head awkwardly. “Are these things all you needed to deactivate the inhibitor collar?”

“You know that saying? ‘Complex systems fail in complex ways’?” Bart waited until the Dark Knight nodded. “Well complex systems also fail in simple ways, and easybutnot obvious ways, and more complex than the system itself ways, and everything in between. Yes, that’s all you need to deactivate an inhibitor collar, but I’ve had a whole lot more practice at it than you. Crashing the mode isn’t a new thing for me.”

“But that’s all you needed to escape an inhibitor collar.” Batman repeated for a third time.

“ _Yes_. That’s all _I_ needed.” Bart stressed. “But I’ve had more practise than you, haven’t I?”

“We’d be interested to learn how you did it.”

“I’ll tell you some time. Not now, but it’s a good trick to have up your sleeve, I’ll grant you that.” He eyed the metal fragments. “So, after I took those from the Brain’s work table, I had to wait to make sure I’d have the time alone to do it properly.”

The teenager continued with his story. From there, it was more familiar, and he skipped over the bits in the Watchtower to when he’d darted into a Zeta tube and escaped into the great wide world. Careful to avoid anything ascribing itself to Bruce Wayne, his house, or his butler Bart gave a quick report about what he’d stolen from the Batcave, if not how he’d put it together. Then he went into more detail and told the room how he’d hidden the EMP on Santa Prisca and been forced to wait until he was able to rescue the Brain.

He had to go over why he couldn’t have left the electronic shell keeping the Brain alive within the radius of an electromagnetic pulse multiple times before anyone accepted the genuine need he’d had to remove the villain from the island. Red Tornado and some of the other more scientifically minded League members backed him up eventually, and the objections stopped, although he got the impression no one was very impressed with him forgetting the Brain afterwards. He gave a short narration about how he’d gotten the super criminal off the island, and started in on the bit that was going to attract the more interest.

Savage and Devastation had captured him in the jungle, he reported, when he’d been watching the rest of the fight. Then there had been a small journey before Savage realised Devastation had been taken down, and then he’d dragged Kid Flash to a cliff by the ocean. At which point the Justice League had turned up, and while Bart was very grateful, he assured them honestly, he would also like the League to remember that unless his powers were shut off, solid objects did not present an insurmountable problem.

Bart described vibrating through Savage’s hand and kicking him in the face, which earned him an outright snort from Zatanna and approving looks from the more war-like heroes. Then Savage had threatened him and he’d threatened Savage right back, although he was careful to keep it less explicit and with a good deal less of the poetic imagery he’d been aiming to evoke the first time round when retelling it to the League. Savage had been spirited away by Klarion.

“Then I set off the EMP.” He finished. “That would’ve been when your communicators stopped working.”

“Except for Batman.” Green Arrow put in.

“Except for Batman.” Bart echoed.

“Where did you get access to that sort of technology?” Superman asked his hooded friend.

“It isn’t hard.” The Atom interrupted. “Shielding from an EMP by a Faraday Cage or an exceptionally stable magnetic field is technology that’s been around for over half a century. It just isn’t common. Perhaps we should work in some on the next redesign of our communicators…” He pulled up a screen from the table top and started typed away intently.

“While our friend works on that,” the Martian Manhunter could have been making a joke, but if he was it was too subtle for Bart to get it, “do we have any further questions?”

“Yes.” Black Canary said decisively. “I, for one, would like to know why you-“

“I’m not interested in your skills as a counsellor, as impressive as I’m sure they would be.” Bart interrupted her. From her expression, he’d guessed her question correctly. “We’ve had this conversation. There’s nothing you can do about it, and the next time you try to lock me somewhere I will actively start refusing to work with you, Canary. I didn’t appreciate that.” He knew Black Canary wasn’t an enemy. She was on his side, even if she kept undercutting him to help him, and her actions weren’t meant to put him on mode. She was misguided, not actively against him, but it still gave Bart satisfaction to see her back down. “If anyone has something to say that isn’t about my past? Am I debriefed now, can I leave?”

“I have a statement, speedster, if you would hear it.” The voice was unexpected. Aquaman drifted around, because La’gann and Kaldur were in the Team, but as a King he didn’t exactly have all that much time to spend joining them on missions, and he’d never spoken much with Bart.

The Atlantian King seemed to be waiting for something. “Uh… go ahead? What’s your question?”

“I never said it was a question.” Aquaman stood up, body language not right for making a declaration, more just as a movement precluding his exit from the room. “You have borne knowledge that might cause great damage. You have kept that knowledge safe above all else, and taken responsibility for it without anyone requesting it of you. I thank thee.”

He turned his back and left. Bart’s face twisted up into what would have been a sneer had his eyes not been so wide and his eyebrows not floating near his hairline. “Did he just… thank me for lying to him for four years?”

Jay moved from his seat. That seemed to be the tipping point which sent other League members to leave or start talking among themselves. Bart wasn’t under any illusions about the topic they were talking about, but it was nice not to be the active centre of attention. “Atlantians-“

“If that sentence ends in any way other than ‘are weird’,” Bart said, still looking at the door Aquaman left through, “it’ll be wrong.”

“Atlantians, or at least our ones,” Bart noted the casual possessiveness of that, “are in the military. They understand classified information, while for the rest of us calling something a secret is just begging for us to poke at it.” The Flash nodded, as if agreeing with his own words.

“So what you’re saying is: they’re weird.” Bart returned his facial expression to something more normal.

“What’s weird for us is normal for them.”

“Like breathing underwater.”

“Like that. For instance.”

“You and Iris back home?” Bart asked it carefully, tone light.

“The twins don’t like it.” Barry grinned ruefully. “They think the space station’s a better house. You should have seen them, oh, two days ago?”

“Oh yes,” Joan laughed. “I’ve never seen Hawkwoman be that patient.”

“Your chicks were good.” The woman in question said as she swept past them. “Fiery spirits, very strong.”

The Flash turned away and fell into step with the winged alien, chatting as they moved out, and when Jay and Joan joined them Bart let himself trail after them, content to laugh at everyone else’s jokes and be out of the spotlight. Don and Dawn had won themselves two new feathery friends from the sounds of things, as Hawkman and Hawkwoman advised Barry on when to hand the children their first weapons.

He stayed through lunch, as it slowly became clear both Hawks were poking fun at the Flash, suggesting more and more increasingly violent experiences the twins should be subject to as Barry tried desperately to find a way to tactfully decline help of that particular variety. While Jay and Hawkwoman exchanged smirks as Hawkman expounded on the value of survival training early in life and Joan hid a smile behind a napkin, Bart excused himself. It didn’t look like Barry was going to catch on to the joke any time soon, and though the food was good Bart wanted to do something. And avoid questions. Mostly the latter if he was honest with himself.

Once dirt side again, Kid Flash realised a critical flaw in his planning. While he didn’t want to listen to League members discussing events and people he either didn’t know about or wasn’t interested in, he didn’t have any other pressing issues. The debrief had taken a fraction of the time he’d thought it would. Bart had been expecting another argument, shouting, accusations and questions and people trying to peel back his shell. Instead he hadn’t even talked for that long. Most of what had been going on in the meeting had to have been a longwinded debate over what government held responsibility for Santa Prisca, and how to hand over the stripped-bare island without it falling right back into the hands of the criminals who had it in the first place. Making sure that their hard work wouldn’t be immediately tossed away was important, Bart could see that, but he’d been expecting something far more like an interrogation.

Not that the surprise was an unpleasant one. Kid Flash wasn’t going to complain about being treated like an equal. It just left him with plenty of time on his hands and no ideas with which to fill it.

He could have run to any corner of the world he liked. Australia or the middle of the ocean or the highest mountains, populated cities or desolate wildernesses that most people never knew existed; they were all permanently within his reach.

So Bart ended up on his bed, sprawled out on his stomach, feet tangled in the blankets he’d pushed down to the end and water colours spread out in front of him in all their colourful array. His art pads were thinner without their paintings inside them, but the pictures up on the walls were worth the slightly off sensation that suggested he was missing half a book from each. The thickest one was the book still unfinished. There had been no need to tear out and hang up pages that hadn’t been painted on yet.

He hadn’t been painting much. Comparatively, of course, it had somehow missed being placed high on his list of priorities, but the last time he’d done anything with art was to comfort his guardians, and the time before that it was to explain his past, and the time before that had been in Savage’s makeshift office, under pressured and locked away from escape. Bart wanted to paint something that wasn’t made for someone else’s scrutiny. He just wanted to paint.

The outline was already done, but it took some effort to remember the precise shades he wanted in the piece and mix the colours up on a plate stolen from the kitchen. He lost himself in the shades and tones stroked over papers, the darker emphasise that marked out trees in an endless background of green and the lighter sharp stab of sunlight reflecting off wet leaves after rain. The clearing took a while to get right. It had been brown, yes, and the huts and vague shapes of people not much different from the cleared dirt around them, but it hadn’t been dirty or dreary or characterless. The clearing in the jungle had been maintained, carefully kept free of weeds, stacks of branches along one side. It had been looked after, cared for, and Bart tried to convey that in his picture of it.

He didn’t know if he got it entirely right. Bart had sketched out the outline and run, to avoid making contact with anyone who had so far stayed safe from the outside world. That strategy had worked, but it left him relying on his memory. He’d expected to make the outline, run home, and paint in the rest, but instead it had been a month. The clearing and the community of thriving villagers living in the middle of the Amazon jungle was unclear and old in his mind.

He stopped when it became too frustrating, leaving the rest of it for another day. Bart stacked up his paints again and put the art book away, before grabbed the glass of muddy, discoloured water and taking it downstairs.

Jay caught him on the bottom stair. “Oh good, I was just about to hoist you up out of that room. Dinner.”

“Dinner?” Bart blinked, mentally recalculating the time.

Jay was used to a little weirdness, and gently propelled him forwards as the teenager mumbled about starting up a search to find where the time went. Bart gave up his glass, rinsing it out and letting the contaminated water drain down the sink, washing his hands and helping the other speedster set out cutlery.

The ebb and flow of the normality was good. Not great, not wonderful or fantastic or magnificent, but a far cry from how unpredictable his life had been ever since he’d been taken to Santa Prisca. Events, people, places, they’d all be shifting underneath him and tripping him up, like the very ground under his feet was shaking. Bart was just thankful that the earthquakes in his life had stopped. So it wasn’t great. But it was truly good.

After he’d been roped into clearing away the debris left behind from the meal Bart asked for Jay and Joan’s phones. With a quick explanation about what had happened to his old one, he was given access to update their contacts list before he went out. Kid Flash costume in place, because as tired as he was of wearing it, normal clothing just wasn’t made for the wear and tear that came with long periods of running, he was about to head out the door when Joan called him back into the kitchen.

“What?” He leaned past the doorway to stick his head in, goggles bumping against the side of his neck as they dangled. “Did I miss something?”

“No, the dishes are all done.” Joan disappeared into the pantry. “Hold on, I have a mission for you.”

“A mission?”

“No criminals, no explosions, and no combat I’m afraid.” She smiled at him, coming back with a plastic container. “You know yesterday, after I told you about the message Jay had gotten from Barry?”

“Um… yes?”

“I did some baking.”

“I thought you were making dinner.”

“It was three o’clock in the afternoon, dear.”

“So what?”

“Never mind.” She thrust the container toward him, and Bart took it obediently. “I made ginger slice, and- No, you can’t have them.”

Bart removed his hand from the container guiltily. “Why not?”

“They’re for Jaime.” She said patiently. “For looking after you while we were gone.”

“I’m not a pet; I don’t need a babysitter, why’veIgot to take them over anyway? Can’t someone else do it?” He asked shiftily.

Joan looked at him oddly. “He’s not my friend, Bart. You’re the one who was staying with him. Don’t you want to?”

“No?” Bart backpedalled. “No, no, this is crash, cool, yeah, I’ll just… go do that then.” He left before she could pick up on his stumbling speech and the way his words almost seemed to want to give him away.

Kid Flash could break the sound barrier without getting out of breath. He could, with the aid of electronics significantly more reliable than his own mind, find his way to any corner of the earth. He could move through storms and past mountains and on top of wild waves without harm. That usually made him a very prompt and reliable mail service, if a sullen and bored one. Taking ginger slices to a location that was so familiar to him he could probably find his way there even with the guidance system on his goggles turned off should not have presented a challenge.

Half an hour after when he should have arrived, Bart was perched on a hill, in some park big enough for him to get lost in without attracting another human being’s attention. If people saw him troubled they always wanted to _talk_. To sit down and have a conversation about it, and while that was sometimes helpful and sometimes good, it didn’t have the success rate everyone seemed to assume. Or maybe he was just different. Being solitary and going off on his own to think about things when forced to take an in depth look at them was useful to him, but maybe that wasn’t normal.

Hanging out with superheroes didn’t give Bart a good baseline for normal. When what was normal was watching Beast Boy turn into a kitten to climb on his alien sister’s lap. When Lagoon Boy’s spines and fins didn’t register as any more different than Wonder Girl’s blonde hair, it told him he didn’t have the same life as the people down on the planet underneath the Watchtower, and that was fine, that was great. Bart didn’t want a life like theirs. He loved his own existence. He loved making a difference with the Team, covering for his friends’ blind spots in fights and throwing popcorn at each other later, running the world over, the speed, the freedom and the sights he got to see with it. Bart wouldn’t exchange it for any price, but he knew it wasn’t anything close to the average human experience.

It gave him a skewed scale. How was he supposed to know how to measure things, how to quantify feelings and experiences when the people he knew were larger than life, their personalities more distilled and their abilities more frightening than the average anonymous person living in their quiet house with a nine-to-five job? Clearly, some of what Bart had counted as fact was fiction. Jay and Joan hadn’t reacted to his sexuality like he thought they would have. Jaime wasn’t as straight as Bart had known him to be. The League weren’t as focused on locking him up as he’d assumed from Black Canary, and they hadn’t tried to push for information on time travel.

The bits of self-reflection were interesting, but ultimately useless. It didn’t matter what things he was wrong about, not right then. Bart could save that for another time and stop trying to distract himself.

There were few options available to him. He could dump the baking in a bush, go home, lie to Joan about it and leave worrying about Jaime for a later date. Alternatively, he could do the dumping bit, but not lie about it to Joan. Talking to her could help. Unfortunately it was far more likely to make them both very uncomfortable and still not resolve anything. He’d only just told her about that gay thing, tossing her into the deep end of the proverbial pool and inundating her with questions about his dating options would not be helpful. There was a difference between accepting a previously unknown part of him and counselling him about said part.

He could deliver the goods while Jaime was out. Which would be a dick move, as would delivering the ginger slices while Jaime was in but without talking to him above the minimum. They’d already gone through their share of dick moves, and it wouldn’t be fair, or right, or any of the other moral ideals everyone in his life had spent so much time trying to install.

Bart could talk, properly, seriously talk to his friend. That brought up a new set of choices. To stay as friends and ignore the mutual attraction issue, or to try dating his best friend and hope like hell that they’d work out, or that if they didn’t work out he wouldn’t lose someone who had been by his side since he first come to his current place in the timeline.

It was scary. Not movie-fake-blood scary, that sort of scared coming from wanting to feel it, a thrill of excitement and adrenaline. Not fighting-scary, when the Team was being beaten and they were running out of options, desperation and anger fuelling tired muscles when energy gave out. It was the mix of the unknown and the known-but-bad, the particular looping thoughts of what could go wrong, what would go wrong, because nothing in his life ever stayed according to the plans he set out.

But Jaime was his friend. First and above anything else, Jaime was his friend, and that meant he deserved more than the trail of dust as Bart turned his back and ran for safer ground. The speedster had promised he’d give Jaime an answer, back when there were too many things and too little time in which to solve them. Jaime hadn’t asked for a time limit. He hadn’t demanded anything. He’d spent so much, too much time helping Bart, setting him straight and cooking him food and listening to him rant about various stupid things, and he still hadn’t asked when Bart was going to decide either way.

Dumping the baking to avoid him, or sneaking in while he was out, or talking to him but not giving him an answer was unacceptable, and less than he deserved.

So friends or more-than?

More-than-friends was the choice carrying risk. Remaining friends was safe, but lacking. More-than-friends was presumably dating, but they went out by themselves frequently anyway. Staying platonic would probably meant awkwardness for a while before they went back to normal. More-than-friends brought up the issue of what the hell to tell the Team. Remaining friends would mean giving up on a lot of the tactile touching. More-than-friends, or, well, boyfriends, that would mean an open invitation to touch. Not just kissing or sex, but climbing all over Jaime’s lap like he was used to doing, with possibly a different goal in mind.

It came down to what Bart wanted. Either alternative was valid, both had their downsides, but what it came down to was what Bart wanted, because Jaime had already made his feelings clear. He wanted to have the permission to look at Jaime, not objectively but appreciatively. He wanted to muss up that hair and slide a hand across skin and touch their lips together. He wanted to have his friend, but he wanted more than that too.

Remaining friends was safe, but _lacking_.

And if he thought that, if he phrased it like that unconsciously and without provocation… Bart swallowed. It was his decision. He chose to risk it.

There was no calming down after that, even if once the decision was made it clicked into place naturally, disconcerting in the ease with which it slotted into his world view. Bart picked the ginger slices in their container up off the ground and began running again, using the steady thrum of feet against ground to stop himself from freaking out or losing what little nerve he could gather.

Jaime answered the door on the first knock, expression briefly showing surprise before it shifted to welcome. “Bart. What you doing back so soon, ese?”

Maybe his crush should have looked different to him now that Bart had set his mind one way or another. If he was supposed to be suddenly overcome by Jaime’s beauty, it wasn’t working. As he glanced at the person standing on the other side of the doorway, extending the simple look with his speed so it stretched out and gave him ample opportunity to catalogue the differences that weren’t there, the more he looked, the more he just saw Jaime. The same Jaime he’d always been, his friend and protector and the person who pulled Bart back when he went too far. Although the attraction was a marginally more recent addition to the mix.

“Present for you.” He phased through the half open door. Bart took off his goggles, leaving them sitting on his forehead and held out the plastic container nervously. “Joan said thank you for taking care of me. I told her I wasn’t a dog, but I figure you’d like these anyway?”

“Um, sure.” Jaime took the parcel away from him and cracked it open. “Food? And you didn’t eat it?”

“Hey! I’m capable of…” Bart trailed off when Jaime snorted. “Fine. Joan said not to and I’m scared of her, you happy?”

“Scared of her as in actually scared or…”

“Do all adults have this ‘I’m not angry I’m _disappointed_ ’ tone?” Bart clarified. “Because I really try to avoid that at all costs.”

“I think they do, yeah.” Jaime headed into the kitchen. For lack of better options, Bart followed, watching as his friend packed away the food into the fridge. “You ever heard mi madre when she’s upset with me? I’m telling you, not fun.”

“Where do they learn to _do_ that? It’s like, the nuclear weapon of getting someone to do something.”

“I don’t know.” Jaime grinned up at him. “Be funny to see whether Kaldur can pull it off.”

“Kaldur was born and has always existed as thirty five. Now, what would really be funny is if we tried to get Captain Marvel to do it, that’d be crash.”

“You know who’d be really good at it?”

“No?”

“Superman.”

“I can top that.” Bart smirked. “Batman.”

“No way.”

“Fine then, the ninja butler.”

“Who doesn’t exist.”

“Does.”

“Doesn’t.”

“Haven’t we gone over this before?”

“Might’ve done,” Jaime said, wandering out of the kitchen and trailing a speedster shadow. He paused in the living room, leaning his weight back on the sofa. “Thanks for coming around. And I suppose I should worship you and praise you as a god for not eating that stuff before it got to me.”

“I’m not that bad!” He protested without any real heat, before recognising where the conversation was heading. “Wait, uh, before I go…”

When Bart didn’t finish his sentence Jaime tilted his head curiously. “Before you go?” He prompted.

“The, er, thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing thing!”

Jaime rolled his eyes. “What, Bart?”

“You’re really going to make me say it?” He rubbed the back of his head awkwardly. Of course, it was equally likely that Jaime really didn’t know what he was talking about. “The thing where we both have crushes on each other but I wouldn’t tell you anything. Because it was a mess. But it isn’t now.”

“Oh.” His face coloured and Jaime ducked his head away. “That.”

“Now he remembers.”

The blush flooding his face wasn’t exactly encouraging.

Bart tried again. “I said I’d tell you once I’d had the chance to get my head together. This is me. Telling you. Hopefully without either of us sinking into the floor from embarrassment.”

“I think I’ve got the second bit covered already, thanks.” Jaime’s posture collapsed, going limp in a way that broadcasted a surprising amount of tension. The pose was a contradiction in and of itself, and it made Bart smile.

The smile more than anything else, seemed to be the bit that made Jaime perk up and pay attention to him, taking a little of the unreasonable worry Bart didn’t like off his stubbly ridiculous face. “Don’t look so glum.” Bart said. “I’m dating you, not sending you to your death.”

“D-dating me?”

Bart nodded, toned down the smile to something a little gentler and stepped forward, hovering on the edge of Jaime’s personal space. As he moved the twist in his lips left him entirely, like he wasn’t capable of hiding the uncomfortably exposed nervousness. He wasn’t used to feeling honest, especially not when he’d rather know that he looked confident and in control, but once the smile fell away Bart didn’t attempt to get it back.

“If you want to,” he murmured, “I could give it a go. I _want_ to give it a go. Benefits outweigh the risks and all of that.”

Jaime snapped up an arm, but the appendage jerked to an aborted stop mid-motion.

That didn’t exactly read as a good sign. Bart shifted on his feet. “Or wecouldjust pretend this conversation never happened, there’sthat too.”

“No.” Another motion, still tentative and hesitant and made up of descriptive words that he didn’t normally associate with his dependable, reliable best friend, but a motion that at least made a light brush of contact. Jaime’s fingers skirted the edge of his red glove, so slight a touch Bart couldn’t feel it through the barrier of fabric between skins. “I… yes. Please.”

“…What are you asking for here? Like, something in particular or just,” Bart gestured vaguely in a movement that was mostly an excuse to fidget, “all of it?”

“All of it. All of it would be nice.”

Bart watched as Jaime realised what he’d just said. Before the declaration could end with him blushing or ducking back again the speedster strode forward. Not within the space of a second, not between blinks or breathes or beats of anyone’s hearts, but in real time, decisively and with a purpose in mind. “Okay.”

His goggles were going to get in the way. Bart pulled them down to dangle around his neck. Jaime’s face stayed flushed as he licked his lips nervously. The speedster couldn’t help tracking the action. He brought up his hands to rest on both sides of Jaime’s black-framed face, and the skin underneath swept through his gloves to warm his palms. They were close. Really close, so close Bart stood with one of his legs in the gap between his friends’ as Jaime tilted up, his posture leaning on the back of the sofa making their height unequal. Bart met his eyes steadily.

He’d only ever possessed patience for important things. Bart waited until just before he thought Jaime was about to start squirming to speak. “I’m going to kiss you now.”

The only reply he received was a huff of air that may-or-may-not have been flavoured with a squeak.

“Is that okay?”

“Bart.” Jaime drew out the four letters into several syllables, annoyed and voice dropping deeper than normal. “Lesson learned cariño, I promise.”

“Yeah,” he chuckled, not entirely repentant, “sorry.”

Then Bart secured the last small distance between them and kissed him.

It was closed mouthed and caste, except for when it wasn’t, because this was Jaime, this was his best friend and they were crossing a major line in the sand. Crossing it for the second time, sure, but Bart was going to put in a good deal of effort to make the second better than the first. He moved his lips and from below him Jaime surged up, clumsy and awkward but with intent.

His partner struggled to his feet, separating them, and with Jaime upright their heights were much more evenly matched with the older of the two slightly taller. Jaime met him for another kiss; although once he got there he didn’t seem to know what to do with it. Bart huffed out a laugh against Jaime’s mouth as he grabbed his friend’s hands, solving the conundrum of where to place them by putting one on his hip and keeping possession on the other one, linking their hands together and running a finger along the web between thumb and forefinger.

“I’m not a girl,” Bart broke off to whisper, “but I’m not a damn alien either. Relax, beetle head.”

The core message got through. Jaime’s shoulders lost their tightness, as Bart marvelled at being able to feel the change through the spare hand he’d slipped to rest on the back of Jaime’s neck. “We’ve met aliens,” Jaime countered, and the easy give and take of the banter made Bart grin cheerily. “They make way more sense than you, remember?”

“True.” Bart acknowledged, and fell back in for another press of lips, presses that were slowly gaining confidence and strength.

His gloves were becoming more and more of an obstacle. An obstruction that was inefficiently and sloppily removed by Jaime, who took the hands they had tangled together and tried to take Bart’s glove off with his one hand. Giving that up with a groan of frustration that sounded so much better with his voice starting to go all husky-deep, he took the other hand off Bart’s waist. Bart didn’t appreciate the distraction from kissing, even if it got his hand free. When Jaime reached back for the hand on his neck Bart beat him to it, twisted round to hold the tips of the material in his teeth and pull it off that way.

It earned him another soft groan. Bart looked up, surprised, before his expression turned cheeky. “That wasn’t supposed to be sexy, y’know.”

“Oh shut up and stop making me do all the work.” Jaime retorted.

“Really?” Bart raised his eyebrows, enjoying the way Jaime was forced to glance up to track his expression, too close to see Bart’s face as a whole. “You’ve been doing all the work, huh?”

A challenge was a challenge, even if it was unspoken, implied or by accident.

Jaime got to the middle of the first word in his sentence before Bart blurred into action. Using his speed for a very valid and imperative cause he switched them, swivelling so that he was the one standing close to the couch and Jaime was where he had been. He let time go back closer to what it was supposed to be, following the blink of Jaime’s eyes as they started out in slow motion and moved back to real speed.

Jaime’s blink finished, and the world righted itself. “Wha-“

Bart beamed lasciviously and moved again, keeping in tune with the world, moving fast but not at superspeed. From his new position he walked forward past the point where they were both pressed together and forced Jaime backwards, smiling all the way. Even so, Jaime looked startled when the back of his head hit the wall with a quiet thump. Bart followed him up, until his friend was stretched out and back and the speedster could truly appreciate the permission to touch.

“This is going to be one of those things I regret daring you to do, isn’t it?” Jaime regained a smirk. Stringing him out to make him easier to ravish didn’t appear to be working as well as Bart hoped.

“Well, I do hope you’ll enjoy it too.”

“Depends.”

“One minute kissing me and he thinks he’s a master,” Bart sighed.

“You did say something about you not being an alien. It’s all very reassuring.”

Bart was too busy cataloguing how put together Jaime’s hair was and running through the ideas he had to undo it to come up with a suitable answer. He hummed a loose affirmative and set to work, moving back in to press at Jaime’s mouth, press at it harder, more insistently, veering completely away from chaste. Jaime didn’t come up with any complaints. When Bart flicked out his tongue and ran it across the skin of Jaime’s lip he earned a small and breathy sound of pleasure, one that made him smile where they were pushed together. The noise spurred him on, curiosity and mischief encouraging him to do more, go further.

When he leaned forward again Jaime’s lips were already open and meeting him halfway. The speedster took that as encouragement, wrapping himself tighter along the line of Jaime’s body, taking his tongue back and sucking on his friend’s bottom lip. When Jaime got on board with that plan and started to actively participate the kiss slipped into something wetter and dirtier, punctuated with little puffs of air as one of them decided they needed to breathe. Bart lost himself in the new and weird sensations, stopping the insistent pressure of all his movements without consciously deciding to do so. What had started as combative and a task for him to prove himself with, competition and struggle, eased back as he slowly realised there was nothing to struggle against. His adversary wasn’t his opponent, and Jaime actually seemed remarkably on board with everything Bart started.

If ‘on board’ was another way of saying that his tongue was currently flicking along the seam of Bart’s lips. Which in all fairness did indicate willingness.

They didn’t exactly stick their tongues down the other’s throat, but Bart was perfectly content with the strange balance before Jaime broke away and thunked his head back into the wall to take in air. Bereft of lips or tongue or mouth, Bart moved. Bringing up a hand and relishing the feeling of bare skin he got without his gloves he wordlessly encouraged Jaime to tilt his head. With a new area of skin exposed, Bart turned to nip at the stubble along his chin experimentally. In the process he discovered that while frustrated groans and soft groans were perfectly acceptable, there was another sort of sound that he’d really like to hear again, thank-you-very-much.

Bart pulled back to assess him. “Slightly dazed and really turned on is a good look for you,” he decided with firm conviction. Jaime raised an eyebrow, but the effect was ruined by his mussed up hair and spit-slicked lips. Bart smirked as he looked up; biting his lip as he met dilated eyes. “Do I win?”

Jaime moved, grabbing Bart’s forearms and using them to lever him around so the speedster was the one bracing himself against the wall. “Yeah cariño,” he murmured, “you win.”

His friend, or boyfriend, or whatever-they-were-now had been backed up against the wall, forced backwards under the gentle but determined assault Bart had given him. Shoulder blades flat up against paint Bart expected the same treatment, not that he was in any way opposed to receiving it.

Like in everything else, Jaime didn’t follow his expectations. He surged forward, but when their lips met it was on the middle ground between light and bruising, heavy enough to matter but not forceful, steady and demanding their own reaction. Bart leaned into the kiss and heard himself make a small, soft noise of satisfaction that he’d worry about later when there wasn’t so much lovely heat and warmth and contact to play with. His arms were still being held almost absentmindedly as attention was directed toward other pursuits, and when he moved them he encountered no resistance, Jaime letting him do whatever he pleased. He wound one in the front of Jaime’s shirt and reached the other up to keep playing with the strands of black hair that weren’t quiet long enough for his fingers to get lost in.

Jaime stopped kissing him. Bart may-or-may-not have let out a whine of protest when he drew back, but he was quickly mollified when his friend returned. But the contact was light and almost dainty, not anywhere near enough, and the speedster glared half-heartedly when it didn’t deepen. “Tease.”

“Impatient.” Jaime chided.

Bart grinned ruefully in agreement. That was an understatement. Bart hadn’t meant to start pushing Jaime up against walls and playing a strange game of who could flip the other person around the most. He hadn’t consciously decided or aimed to stick his tongue into Jaime’s mouth, not then, not until later. It was just supposed to be a kiss to reassure Jaime and give him a certain, definite answer, but with all the self-control of a small puppy he’d fallen into much more.

Self-control he might not have, but even a hyperactive teenager could see that perhaps falling into bed with his best friend after all the threads of mess they’d been entangled then had barely even been removed wasn’t a good idea. With one deep breath and then another, Bart fought down the impatience that just wanted instantaneous gratification and curled the fingers he had in Jaime’s hair. His friend seemed to understand the attempt to slow himself down. Jaime responded by running two fingers along Bart’s jaw, a dawdling brushing touch that Bart didn’t quite know what to do with. His friend caught his lips in a slow, solemn drift of pressure and warmth, a kiss that felt bigger than it was. Unhurried and deep and pleasing enough to make Bart’s eyes flicker shut as he went pliant, it lacked playfulness, not trying to provoke an action or explore newly opened up territory, but instead serious and thoughtful and almost worth all the mess it had taken to get them both that far. It was what they should have started off with, Bart realised. It was Jaime making up for that.

When it ended Jaime backed off and Bart opened his eyes, making an irritated huff when his friend withdrew a step backwards out of direct kissing range and dislodged Bart’s hand from his hair. The flush on Jaime’s cheeks hadn’t gone away, but by now Bart fully expected it to be matched by one on his own face as well, and Jaime met his eyes easily enough. “You okay?”

Bart smiled, an expression he could feel was too soft and sweet and truthful to be any good. “I am,” he promised.

Sure, the getting-to-where-they-were bit had not been fun. All the revelations, both about him and about how deep the rot that the Light was planning had gone, all the worry that came with that. The damn explanations, because he was sure he’d never encountered anything more exhausting in his life. The strange tightrope he was still on with the Justice League, trusted and thought of as broken all at once. All that work he’d had to do to convince his friends that he wasn’t shattered. The mess their first kiss had been. None of that had been crash.

But the results. He didn’t have to hide and dodge and deflect questions. He could talk about his past without giving away things that he shouldn’t have. People were finally starting to see him as more than just a fast paced prankster, they might actually even let him into the laboratories. The Light was gone, dispersed for the moment and with the Brain locked up under twenty four hour watch. His family was safe, and happy, and even more astonishingly accepting of who he was and what gender he wanted to date. All the dragging burdens and worries and panic that he’d been forced into were gone, dissolved and banished so far away it took effort to remember them. For an amount of time that was too depressing to contemplate he’d been weighted, pressured, twisted this way and that by a million contradicting factors. Now the weights were gone. It shouldn’t have literally translated to such a lightened feeling of relief.

Slowly, his smile morphed into a weirdly giddy happiness. “I’m fine, better than fine. Everything’s crash.”

And Bart reeled him in for another kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story has taken up my time,my life and my thoughts for over two months now, far before I ever got the courage to post a single word. It has reached over one hundred thousand words, and has only managed to do so because of the few special people who have consistently stood up to help me. Mangosandstuff, you are the reason that the argument in the very first chapter doesn’t read like a five year old had written it, even though I don’t speak Spanish. I owe you.
> 
> Lupintyde, you have been there for so long, and given me so much encouragement, and I must have sounded like a raving lunatic most of the time. You are the reason half the ideas in this story even exist at all. You are the reason I didn’t give up entirely half way through writing part eleven for the seventh time. Everyone who has enjoyed Strength in all its Forms should give you their gratitude, and no one more then me.
> 
> For everyone who has enjoyed this piece, read it and liked, if you would tell me why I promise to treasure that feedback (either here or directed towards my tumblr account, http://ramblesoftiri.tumblr.com/). It helps me grow and gives me the continual boost needed to combat writers block, and occasionally I can be found going back through feedback I received months ago and squealing in shocked glee as I rediscover what was written about me.
> 
> This has been an adventure in and of itself. I’ll let you guys get to the actual story.
> 
> ~Tiri


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